Hugh
1994
"Ness thought he heard his mother from far away."
Earthbound has been a presence in my life since I was a child, though initially it was from quite a distance. I would see the game referenced in magazine articles, or ScrewAttack Top 10s. I would see it mentioned in forum posts as an underrated classic, ballooning in importance as the years went on until it was eventually championed as one of the all time great video games. When Earthbound was released for the Wii U in 2013, I finally had a chance to play it. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but somehow got stuck in Twoson and dropped the game there. Many years later it was again rereleased, this time for the Switch. "Finally, I can redeem myself and finish Earthbound." I thought. Once again, my playthrough ended in Twoson. Years have passed, and I'm happy to report that over a decade after my first attempt to play Earthbound, I've finally rolled credits. It is an odd feeling.
Earthbound has plenty of faults. Its battle system is pretty good, but can be overbearing at times when there exist some fights that simply will not let you win. Endgame enemies deflection your damage and causing a guaranteed HP loss for multiple party members upon death is a good idea to force cautious resource management on the player, but by the time you've reached that final dungeon you're probably too busy wanting the game to be over to be welcoming of that added stress. Earthbound's narrative progression is gated by a lot of little fetch quests and point A to B navigation, none of which are particularly obtuse but some of which definitely grate. Completing a dungeon only to be told you have to spend 10 minutes returning to a prior area, talking to an NPC, and then going back to the dungeon location to continue to the story happens on several occasions and it never feels like anything other than padding. The game ultimately feels quite a bit longer than it should.
The core of the game's content is quite strong, however. Bosses are fun and interesting, a lot of the enemies are charming and likeable, and every area you enter has great appeal. The art and music are unique as hell, and lends the game an irresistible charm. No other game has ever quite managed to have the 'flavor' of an Earthbound, even a game like Undertale that you can tell is trying its hardest. I think that's because, for all its irreverence, Earthbound is hiding within itself one of video gaming's most melancholy hearts. The nostalgia people have for Earthbound today is due to the game itself being a total pincer attack - on one hand, you have its inimitable style, and on the other, it's a game very much about nostalgia itself.
I remember the first time I played Earthbound, back in 2013. I was still in high school, though not for long. I would finish school and come home most days to walk my dog and handle errands around the house. Often I'd snack on a few strawberries - my favorite fruit. Eventually my mom would come home. She'd cook dinner, we'd all eat, and after dishes were done I'd head to my room to do homework or watch TV or play a game. Usually the latter. Playing Earthbound now, I can't help but reflect on those days. Things are a lot harder now - that's how it goes everyone, right? Things get tougher the older you get and the less connected you get from the way things used to be. One thing people do to help cope is to remember. Remember sitting down with their family and eating their favorite meal. Remember their childhood friends playing a game at the park. Remember their mother's laugh when they would tell a silly joke. As we get old, we all go through a terribly difficult journey, each our own. We battle forces from outside as well as within. Often, we overcome them. We forge our paths with determination, vision, and love. And that courage and love doesn't come from nothing, it gets instilled in us when we are young. By our mothers, our fathers, our teachers, our friends. It is through them that we are made to become the versions of ourselves that can overcome trials and succeed at tasks once unimaginable. And it is through our memories of them that we can keep ourselves level.
Yesterday was Mother's Day. I couldn't afford to buy my mother a gift. She smiled at me and we ate quiche and strawberries.
Earthbound has been a presence in my life since I was a child, though initially it was from quite a distance. I would see the game referenced in magazine articles, or ScrewAttack Top 10s. I would see it mentioned in forum posts as an underrated classic, ballooning in importance as the years went on until it was eventually championed as one of the all time great video games. When Earthbound was released for the Wii U in 2013, I finally had a chance to play it. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but somehow got stuck in Twoson and dropped the game there. Many years later it was again rereleased, this time for the Switch. "Finally, I can redeem myself and finish Earthbound." I thought. Once again, my playthrough ended in Twoson. Years have passed, and I'm happy to report that over a decade after my first attempt to play Earthbound, I've finally rolled credits. It is an odd feeling.
Earthbound has plenty of faults. Its battle system is pretty good, but can be overbearing at times when there exist some fights that simply will not let you win. Endgame enemies deflection your damage and causing a guaranteed HP loss for multiple party members upon death is a good idea to force cautious resource management on the player, but by the time you've reached that final dungeon you're probably too busy wanting the game to be over to be welcoming of that added stress. Earthbound's narrative progression is gated by a lot of little fetch quests and point A to B navigation, none of which are particularly obtuse but some of which definitely grate. Completing a dungeon only to be told you have to spend 10 minutes returning to a prior area, talking to an NPC, and then going back to the dungeon location to continue to the story happens on several occasions and it never feels like anything other than padding. The game ultimately feels quite a bit longer than it should.
The core of the game's content is quite strong, however. Bosses are fun and interesting, a lot of the enemies are charming and likeable, and every area you enter has great appeal. The art and music are unique as hell, and lends the game an irresistible charm. No other game has ever quite managed to have the 'flavor' of an Earthbound, even a game like Undertale that you can tell is trying its hardest. I think that's because, for all its irreverence, Earthbound is hiding within itself one of video gaming's most melancholy hearts. The nostalgia people have for Earthbound today is due to the game itself being a total pincer attack - on one hand, you have its inimitable style, and on the other, it's a game very much about nostalgia itself.
I remember the first time I played Earthbound, back in 2013. I was still in high school, though not for long. I would finish school and come home most days to walk my dog and handle errands around the house. Often I'd snack on a few strawberries - my favorite fruit. Eventually my mom would come home. She'd cook dinner, we'd all eat, and after dishes were done I'd head to my room to do homework or watch TV or play a game. Usually the latter. Playing Earthbound now, I can't help but reflect on those days. Things are a lot harder now - that's how it goes everyone, right? Things get tougher the older you get and the less connected you get from the way things used to be. One thing people do to help cope is to remember. Remember sitting down with their family and eating their favorite meal. Remember their childhood friends playing a game at the park. Remember their mother's laugh when they would tell a silly joke. As we get old, we all go through a terribly difficult journey, each our own. We battle forces from outside as well as within. Often, we overcome them. We forge our paths with determination, vision, and love. And that courage and love doesn't come from nothing, it gets instilled in us when we are young. By our mothers, our fathers, our teachers, our friends. It is through them that we are made to become the versions of ourselves that can overcome trials and succeed at tasks once unimaginable. And it is through our memories of them that we can keep ourselves level.
Yesterday was Mother's Day. I couldn't afford to buy my mother a gift. She smiled at me and we ate quiche and strawberries.
1995
It's been a long time coming. I owned Chrono Trigger when it released on the Nintendo DS 2008. I was only 13, and I was barely familiar with the reverence the game had. I think. It's hard to remember. I fell in love with the game, but I don't recall getting very far. I made it to the Sewer Access and Factory areas during the first visit to Future, but that's my only memory of the game. Fittingly, every other aspect of my experience with Chrono Trigger back then has been lost to time. Finally now, almost 30 years on from the game's release, I've had the chance to play through the entirety of Chrono Trigger. And wow! People were right! This game rocks!
Separated as I am from the context of its 1995 release, it's hard to even fathom how this game blew minds back then. I only know that it did. But even in 2024, if the technical aspects that impressed back then don't have quite the same sheen, it's still easy to tell how things like the more 'grounded' battle transitions and time travel concepts stood out from other games of the era. Most notable I think is the game's pacing, which trades in the wandering and 'hanging out' popular even among RPGs of its age for a more frenetic, fast-paced roller coaster ride that is constantly introducing you to new dungeons, enemy concepts, and unique boss fights. It never lets its foot off the gas - even when it finally opens up towards the end, all of the sidequest paths you can choose to explore lead to exciting and unique dungeons and bosses. Not super difficult bosses though - another drastic change from many RPGs of its time is the game's ease of play. It's pretty breezy! I died twice, and one of those times was from trying to take on the game's final boss as soon as it was available. Which is in itself a radical feature that I'd love to see more games try to implement nowadays.
Fairly short and insubstantial review here I know, but it's hard to say much about Chrono Trigger that hasn't been said. What an impressive delight.
Separated as I am from the context of its 1995 release, it's hard to even fathom how this game blew minds back then. I only know that it did. But even in 2024, if the technical aspects that impressed back then don't have quite the same sheen, it's still easy to tell how things like the more 'grounded' battle transitions and time travel concepts stood out from other games of the era. Most notable I think is the game's pacing, which trades in the wandering and 'hanging out' popular even among RPGs of its age for a more frenetic, fast-paced roller coaster ride that is constantly introducing you to new dungeons, enemy concepts, and unique boss fights. It never lets its foot off the gas - even when it finally opens up towards the end, all of the sidequest paths you can choose to explore lead to exciting and unique dungeons and bosses. Not super difficult bosses though - another drastic change from many RPGs of its time is the game's ease of play. It's pretty breezy! I died twice, and one of those times was from trying to take on the game's final boss as soon as it was available. Which is in itself a radical feature that I'd love to see more games try to implement nowadays.
Fairly short and insubstantial review here I know, but it's hard to say much about Chrono Trigger that hasn't been said. What an impressive delight.
When I was a kid, Metroid Prime was the game that made me love video games. It made me understand what this medium could really be. When the Trilogy release came out for the Wii, I began a tradition of playing all three games every year. This continued until the release of the Nintendo Switch, where I put my Wii and Wii U down for good and vowed to return to the games only when Nintendo released them for the new platform. It took a long while, but in 2023 it finally happened, and Prime was better than I remembered. We're still waiting on the other two, but for now, I can see no reason not to resume the tradition with this incredible remaster. For the first time, in at least 7 full playthroughs of Metroid Prime, I put the game on Hard Mode. I figured it would be annoying and spongey, but that it would be an interesting new way to experience the game. I also went with the classic Gamecube control scheme this time, playing the game as it was meant to be played for the first time in almost 20 years.
I am beyond thrilled to report that Metroid Prime not only holds up, it holds up better than it ever has. Really, I think this was the most I've ever enjoyed Metroid Prime. As I've gotten older, and as I've experienced many many more video games and watched video essays and GDC talks, even worked on designing my own video games, I've become much more intimately familiar with game design as an art. The way a game guides you, the way a game paces itself, plays upon your expectations, challenges the skillsets you've been taught. It really cannot be overstated how unbelievably well designed Metroid Prime is. Its map is tighter than it seems, and it dots its objectives so smartly the player doesn't even realize how good the trick is. The illusion of an open confusing map, when in reality the player is almost always being led to the right place without even knowing it. It's really something else. This gets stretched quite a bit in the endgame, as now the entire map is yours to explore. The endgame gauntlet as you descend through the Phazon Mines to get the Power Bombs, then climb back out in order to get the Grapple Hook, X-Ray Visor, and Plasma Beam... they really send you back across pretty much the entire map. I've seen complaints about the backtracking, specifically about how every area doesn't connect to every area, causing a longer than desired detour in order to venture to some of the more out of the way destinations. Hell, I even picked some of those same nits myself when I last played the game. My eyes are open now, though. The game sends you all that way so you can pick up the Artifacts, grab all the collectibles, visit those final rooms in Chozo Ruins and Phendrana Drifts that you couldn't yet reach. I knew this during my last playthrough of course, it's a pretty obvious move. But somehow I didn't fully grasp the genius of it - how subtly and smartly these necessary powerup destinations cross paths with the Artifacts you need. By the time I got back to the Mines with all the abilities I needed to take on the Omega Pirate, I had already picked up every Artifact besides the one you need the Phazon Suit for - an Artifact handily located on your trip back up through the Mine, ripe for the picking. The game design is perfect. Just perfect.
Just as notable as the game design (and the incredible soundtrack, sound design, visuals both in 2002 and 2024, etc) is how obviously influential the game has clearly been, and how its effects still ripple through the industry to this day. Exploring this abandoned civilization, only getting to read vague descriptions as lore and otherwise using the world design and environmental cues of this decaying world to tell a story. That's all an apt description of Metroid Prime, but it's also an equally apt description of Dark Souls and the many games that would follow in its wake. I'm not arguing that Metroid Prime was the chief inspiration for Dark Souls - it's more likely that Ocarina of Time was more significant - but it certainly stood out to me on this playthrough just how many cues modern games take from Metroid Prime's storytelling. Little things like all the doors in Tallon IV having been installed by the Space Pirates, with the different beam doors correlating to 'Security Clearance Levels' for their troops. The whole 'Metroid Prime' thing itself famously falls apart under intense scrutiny, but I'm willing to ignore that in the face of how much the game gets right here, especially for 2002. When games were only just beginning to excel at telling stories with sound and visuals over text descriptions, Metroid Prime wordlessly manages to combine both to build an untouchable atmosphere and create a unique game world codex all its own.
Please port the other two games Nintendo I am begging you. Shocking as this sounds after this review, the last time I played the Trilogy back in 2016 I considered Metroid Prime my least favorite of the three games. I'm fiending for a chance to see how the others stack up. Let me at 'em.
I am beyond thrilled to report that Metroid Prime not only holds up, it holds up better than it ever has. Really, I think this was the most I've ever enjoyed Metroid Prime. As I've gotten older, and as I've experienced many many more video games and watched video essays and GDC talks, even worked on designing my own video games, I've become much more intimately familiar with game design as an art. The way a game guides you, the way a game paces itself, plays upon your expectations, challenges the skillsets you've been taught. It really cannot be overstated how unbelievably well designed Metroid Prime is. Its map is tighter than it seems, and it dots its objectives so smartly the player doesn't even realize how good the trick is. The illusion of an open confusing map, when in reality the player is almost always being led to the right place without even knowing it. It's really something else. This gets stretched quite a bit in the endgame, as now the entire map is yours to explore. The endgame gauntlet as you descend through the Phazon Mines to get the Power Bombs, then climb back out in order to get the Grapple Hook, X-Ray Visor, and Plasma Beam... they really send you back across pretty much the entire map. I've seen complaints about the backtracking, specifically about how every area doesn't connect to every area, causing a longer than desired detour in order to venture to some of the more out of the way destinations. Hell, I even picked some of those same nits myself when I last played the game. My eyes are open now, though. The game sends you all that way so you can pick up the Artifacts, grab all the collectibles, visit those final rooms in Chozo Ruins and Phendrana Drifts that you couldn't yet reach. I knew this during my last playthrough of course, it's a pretty obvious move. But somehow I didn't fully grasp the genius of it - how subtly and smartly these necessary powerup destinations cross paths with the Artifacts you need. By the time I got back to the Mines with all the abilities I needed to take on the Omega Pirate, I had already picked up every Artifact besides the one you need the Phazon Suit for - an Artifact handily located on your trip back up through the Mine, ripe for the picking. The game design is perfect. Just perfect.
Just as notable as the game design (and the incredible soundtrack, sound design, visuals both in 2002 and 2024, etc) is how obviously influential the game has clearly been, and how its effects still ripple through the industry to this day. Exploring this abandoned civilization, only getting to read vague descriptions as lore and otherwise using the world design and environmental cues of this decaying world to tell a story. That's all an apt description of Metroid Prime, but it's also an equally apt description of Dark Souls and the many games that would follow in its wake. I'm not arguing that Metroid Prime was the chief inspiration for Dark Souls - it's more likely that Ocarina of Time was more significant - but it certainly stood out to me on this playthrough just how many cues modern games take from Metroid Prime's storytelling. Little things like all the doors in Tallon IV having been installed by the Space Pirates, with the different beam doors correlating to 'Security Clearance Levels' for their troops. The whole 'Metroid Prime' thing itself famously falls apart under intense scrutiny, but I'm willing to ignore that in the face of how much the game gets right here, especially for 2002. When games were only just beginning to excel at telling stories with sound and visuals over text descriptions, Metroid Prime wordlessly manages to combine both to build an untouchable atmosphere and create a unique game world codex all its own.
Please port the other two games Nintendo I am begging you. Shocking as this sounds after this review, the last time I played the Trilogy back in 2016 I considered Metroid Prime my least favorite of the three games. I'm fiending for a chance to see how the others stack up. Let me at 'em.
This review contains spoilers
“DELIVER UNTO US THE REMNANTS OF OUR PAST. RESTORE THEM TO THEIR RIGHTFUL PLACE.”
From the early hours of the first game, it’s very clear that the Final Fantasy VII Remake project, encompassing a trilogy of games, is going to be about the process of the creatives remaking the game just as much as it is about actually remaking it. With REBIRTH we reach the middle chapter, and as the name implies it’s very much a game about new beginnings. It took me 100 hours to roll credits on this behemoth, and the whole way through I was being surprised and delighted by all manner of gameplay scenario, brilliant mechanic, and charming dialogue. Yet despite its enormity, Square Enix is able to keep a tight grasp on the game’s many running themes. I believe Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is absolutely one of the all time great video games, and the best Final Fantasy in over 20 years, and it’s that good precisely because of its ability to balance the heart and soul of its script with its immense wealth of Video Gamey goofiness and game-iness. And the creative team remembers one thing above all else: Final Fantasy VII is a game that means a lot of things to a lot of people, and all of those people want something different from this Remake project. Just as much as you feel celebration in Rebirth, you can feel fear. Fear of all the things that everyone wants. Fear of the people shipping Cloud with Aerith, of the people shipping Cloud with Tifa, of the people shipping Cloud with Chadley. Fear of the people demanding Aerith stay dead and demanding she be saved. Fear of the people wanting a perfectly faithful remake and the people wanting a new adventure built on the bones of the old. To remake a game like Final Fantasy VII is a thankless task, and with Rebirth the developers have realized the true potential of it: To deliver a story about delivering a story.
In FF7 Rebirth, we are shown a Planet that has been decimated by the defeat of the Whispers from REMAKE. Fate no longer being a set path has resulted in many doors opening within the planet, each doomed to a quick death but living potent lives while they’re around. This renders the planet even less stable than Shinra’s mako-farming already did. Every possibility is playing out, all at once, with every choice opening more doors, putting more strain on a planet in peril. As usual, Sephiroth designs some bullshit convoluted plan to manipulate this strain, uniting all of these worlds, making all the grief and despair and loss within them manifest at once and using that to do weird Sephiroth shit. And of course he’d want this, because I’m sure it’s what the creative team behind these games wanted too. Let Zack live! Let Aerith live! Jessie, Biggs, Wedge, everyone gets to live! Cloud gets with whoever the player wants, it’s all valid somewhere! Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone could get everything they wanted?
“Ever wish you could just snap your fingers and forget the worst stuff?”
“It’s a part of who we are. Whether we like it or not.”
“Yeah. The deepest wounds never really heal.”
In their soulsearching for how to handle this, the developers of this game came to a sad conclusion. Final Fantasy VII is a game about losing things, and building something new from their ashes. Aerith’s death is possibly the most famous loss in the history of this medium. To save her would be to deny what Final Fantasy VII is. So instead of doing that, instead of giving everyone what they want, Square Enix instead shows us what that looks like. A bright mess, with visual metaphors and expository dialogue being thrown as everywhere fast as the camera can keep up. And then just as quickly, they hammer down on loss yet again. We save Aerith, deflecting Sephiroth’s fatal blow in a magical moment of deus ex machina that probably delighted as many people as it disgusted. Only to reverse those emotions upon the reveal that, no, we didn’t. Cloud as an unreliable narrator was always a key component of Final Fantasy VII, but in Rebirth that bit is played significantly more loudly and more frequently. At the start of the game, Cloud misremembers his past, to the great concern of his GIRLFRIEND LOVE OF HIS LIFE DARLING Tifa. But by its end, even his present and future are distorted. It was fascinating to me, seeing Square go for this. Turning our beloved if awkward protagonist into an empty vessel over the course of a massive adventure felt… wrong, in a way that felt right. It’s the opposite of your typical character development, and by the end it feels tremendously unsettling. Watching Cloud scamper madly after Aerith to get the Black Materia from her, only to give it up like a dog with a bone the instant Sephiroth tells him to hell, is emotionally frightening in much the same way that Cloud assaulting Aerith in the original is viscerally frightening. And I feel like that subtler edge is sprinkled over the game writ large - we don’t see Sephy kill Aerith here, but we see him flick her blood into Cloud’s face, see Aerith manipulate the lifestream to say a few parting words, and see Cloud descend into disbelief and madness for the remainder of the running time. The parallel worlds and timelines nonsense is handled in a very Lynchian way here, lending it all the emotional understanding that it lacks in logical understanding.
Its ending may be convoluted and messy, but the moments that should hit do hit, especially when you’re watching them again without expectation. It’s all very smartly done, making for a hype and difficult final challenge while also paying off both the subtle and unsubtle visual and emotional language that the game had spent so much time building. Final Fantasy VII is a monolith, and Rebirth feels like a game that manages to bring out both the darkness and the light within it.
All the while, you are also experiencing, yknow, an enormous 100 hour JRPG, full of sidequests and minigames and dumb bullshit galore. The combat is fantastic, the cutscene direction is top tier, and every odd task and bizarre mechanical addition lends itself to creating an absolute benchmark in video game scope. This is the first time I’ve ever felt like a current gen video game has approached the enormity and variety of one of the classic PS1 RPGs that this game is remaking, and seeing it with so much panache is genuinely electric. I was never bored and never anything more than intentionally annoyed. Even if the game had no script at all, it would be one of the all time great video games solely based on its video game-iness alone. It’s truly something special.
All these words said and I still feel like I haven’t scratched the surface. This is an extremely dense game, stuffed full to bursting with worldbuilding, visual metaphor, complicated themes and complex storytelling. It would take many playthroughs and many more hours of analysis and thought for me to come to some sort of truly comprehensive overview of what this game is trying to say and do. But for now, I think I get the gist. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is very much a game about creating itself, about the many doors open to its creators and the struggle to deliver something that could make everybody happy. The struggle to resist their own urges, the struggle to resist the easy temptations of both pleasure and pretentiousness. In that same sense, Rebirth is also about clinging to yourself, holding on to what you are in the face of insurmountable terror and pain. Of using your past to overcome your present and face a bright future. About how what has been lost, what has been stolen, what has been destroyed is never gone. It is only turned into something else. Everything we ever have is with us always, and it’s how we use those things that define who we are. Are we Rufus and Dyne, letting our past manipulate us and goad us into destruction? Or are we Aerith, or Tifa? Using what we’ve lost to strengthen our principles, to move on with fiery eyes towards the unknown?
“Reflect on thy long and bloody path, and kindle life’s fire anew. Forget not thine ire. For it shall remake you.”
From the early hours of the first game, it’s very clear that the Final Fantasy VII Remake project, encompassing a trilogy of games, is going to be about the process of the creatives remaking the game just as much as it is about actually remaking it. With REBIRTH we reach the middle chapter, and as the name implies it’s very much a game about new beginnings. It took me 100 hours to roll credits on this behemoth, and the whole way through I was being surprised and delighted by all manner of gameplay scenario, brilliant mechanic, and charming dialogue. Yet despite its enormity, Square Enix is able to keep a tight grasp on the game’s many running themes. I believe Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is absolutely one of the all time great video games, and the best Final Fantasy in over 20 years, and it’s that good precisely because of its ability to balance the heart and soul of its script with its immense wealth of Video Gamey goofiness and game-iness. And the creative team remembers one thing above all else: Final Fantasy VII is a game that means a lot of things to a lot of people, and all of those people want something different from this Remake project. Just as much as you feel celebration in Rebirth, you can feel fear. Fear of all the things that everyone wants. Fear of the people shipping Cloud with Aerith, of the people shipping Cloud with Tifa, of the people shipping Cloud with Chadley. Fear of the people demanding Aerith stay dead and demanding she be saved. Fear of the people wanting a perfectly faithful remake and the people wanting a new adventure built on the bones of the old. To remake a game like Final Fantasy VII is a thankless task, and with Rebirth the developers have realized the true potential of it: To deliver a story about delivering a story.
In FF7 Rebirth, we are shown a Planet that has been decimated by the defeat of the Whispers from REMAKE. Fate no longer being a set path has resulted in many doors opening within the planet, each doomed to a quick death but living potent lives while they’re around. This renders the planet even less stable than Shinra’s mako-farming already did. Every possibility is playing out, all at once, with every choice opening more doors, putting more strain on a planet in peril. As usual, Sephiroth designs some bullshit convoluted plan to manipulate this strain, uniting all of these worlds, making all the grief and despair and loss within them manifest at once and using that to do weird Sephiroth shit. And of course he’d want this, because I’m sure it’s what the creative team behind these games wanted too. Let Zack live! Let Aerith live! Jessie, Biggs, Wedge, everyone gets to live! Cloud gets with whoever the player wants, it’s all valid somewhere! Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone could get everything they wanted?
“Ever wish you could just snap your fingers and forget the worst stuff?”
“It’s a part of who we are. Whether we like it or not.”
“Yeah. The deepest wounds never really heal.”
In their soulsearching for how to handle this, the developers of this game came to a sad conclusion. Final Fantasy VII is a game about losing things, and building something new from their ashes. Aerith’s death is possibly the most famous loss in the history of this medium. To save her would be to deny what Final Fantasy VII is. So instead of doing that, instead of giving everyone what they want, Square Enix instead shows us what that looks like. A bright mess, with visual metaphors and expository dialogue being thrown as everywhere fast as the camera can keep up. And then just as quickly, they hammer down on loss yet again. We save Aerith, deflecting Sephiroth’s fatal blow in a magical moment of deus ex machina that probably delighted as many people as it disgusted. Only to reverse those emotions upon the reveal that, no, we didn’t. Cloud as an unreliable narrator was always a key component of Final Fantasy VII, but in Rebirth that bit is played significantly more loudly and more frequently. At the start of the game, Cloud misremembers his past, to the great concern of his GIRLFRIEND LOVE OF HIS LIFE DARLING Tifa. But by its end, even his present and future are distorted. It was fascinating to me, seeing Square go for this. Turning our beloved if awkward protagonist into an empty vessel over the course of a massive adventure felt… wrong, in a way that felt right. It’s the opposite of your typical character development, and by the end it feels tremendously unsettling. Watching Cloud scamper madly after Aerith to get the Black Materia from her, only to give it up like a dog with a bone the instant Sephiroth tells him to hell, is emotionally frightening in much the same way that Cloud assaulting Aerith in the original is viscerally frightening. And I feel like that subtler edge is sprinkled over the game writ large - we don’t see Sephy kill Aerith here, but we see him flick her blood into Cloud’s face, see Aerith manipulate the lifestream to say a few parting words, and see Cloud descend into disbelief and madness for the remainder of the running time. The parallel worlds and timelines nonsense is handled in a very Lynchian way here, lending it all the emotional understanding that it lacks in logical understanding.
Its ending may be convoluted and messy, but the moments that should hit do hit, especially when you’re watching them again without expectation. It’s all very smartly done, making for a hype and difficult final challenge while also paying off both the subtle and unsubtle visual and emotional language that the game had spent so much time building. Final Fantasy VII is a monolith, and Rebirth feels like a game that manages to bring out both the darkness and the light within it.
All the while, you are also experiencing, yknow, an enormous 100 hour JRPG, full of sidequests and minigames and dumb bullshit galore. The combat is fantastic, the cutscene direction is top tier, and every odd task and bizarre mechanical addition lends itself to creating an absolute benchmark in video game scope. This is the first time I’ve ever felt like a current gen video game has approached the enormity and variety of one of the classic PS1 RPGs that this game is remaking, and seeing it with so much panache is genuinely electric. I was never bored and never anything more than intentionally annoyed. Even if the game had no script at all, it would be one of the all time great video games solely based on its video game-iness alone. It’s truly something special.
All these words said and I still feel like I haven’t scratched the surface. This is an extremely dense game, stuffed full to bursting with worldbuilding, visual metaphor, complicated themes and complex storytelling. It would take many playthroughs and many more hours of analysis and thought for me to come to some sort of truly comprehensive overview of what this game is trying to say and do. But for now, I think I get the gist. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is very much a game about creating itself, about the many doors open to its creators and the struggle to deliver something that could make everybody happy. The struggle to resist their own urges, the struggle to resist the easy temptations of both pleasure and pretentiousness. In that same sense, Rebirth is also about clinging to yourself, holding on to what you are in the face of insurmountable terror and pain. Of using your past to overcome your present and face a bright future. About how what has been lost, what has been stolen, what has been destroyed is never gone. It is only turned into something else. Everything we ever have is with us always, and it’s how we use those things that define who we are. Are we Rufus and Dyne, letting our past manipulate us and goad us into destruction? Or are we Aerith, or Tifa? Using what we’ve lost to strengthen our principles, to move on with fiery eyes towards the unknown?
“Reflect on thy long and bloody path, and kindle life’s fire anew. Forget not thine ire. For it shall remake you.”
2024
This review contains spoilers
Life… where does it originate? Where does it go?
Persona 3 released in 2006 for the Playstation 2. I played its 2007 re-release, Persona 3 FES, on the PS2 in 2014. I then played its 2009 re-release, Persona 3 Portable, on the PSP in 2016 and then again on the Nintendo Switch in 2023, though I didn’t finish either of those attempts. My PSP was stolen in a burglary during my first playthrough, and life got in the way during that second. By the time that modern platform port of Portable was released, reliable sources had already made it pretty apparent that we would be getting a modernized full remake of the game in the near future anyway, so I wasn’t too bothered to let it go. Since playing Persona 5 on its release, I’ve dreamt of a game like Reload. A version of Persona 3 that modernizes and enhances it, makes it look and play as good as 5 while maintaining the atmosphere and writing that made 3 my favorite in the franchise. Now that it’s here, it’s kind of surreal. Things have changed a lot in my life since I first played Persona 3, but at the same time, they haven’t changed at all. I’m still playing Persona, so really, how much better could things have gotten?
As a remake, Persona 3 Reload does leave a little bit to be desired, and I’m not referring to the content from FES and Portable that was cut (with The Answer apparently relegated to upcoming DLC.) It’s in the style. Persona 3’s PS2 versions had anime cutscenes that were unlike anything else out there at the time, and certainly unlike anything today. More Serial Experiments Lain than Spy x Family, the anime cutscenes in the original release were equal parts striking and bizarre. In Reload, these original scenes have been replaced by either a new, much less interesting anime cutscene, or a ‘pretty good’ in-engine replacement. Some of these in-engine scenes, particularly the one depicting Aragaki’s death, are quite good. But all of the new animated scenes lack the dark strangeness of their originals, and in a game this reliant on dark strangeness to build its atmosphere, that's a loss worth grieving. Still, that’s about all the negatives I have for Reload on the remake front. In every other category, it goes above and beyond. The visuals are largely excellent, and the stylish pop UI of Persona 5 has been translated wonderfully to the more slow and stoic Persona 3, all shades of blues and odd angles. The music has been faithfully rerecorded and remixed, and while some of these updated renditions took some getting used to they are by and large sideways leaps at the worst. Many stand tall over their initial renditions, and I feel comfortable calling Reload’s soundtrack the best in the franchise to date. Combat has gotten perhaps the biggest glowup, with the addition of P5’s Baton Pass mechanic (now called Shift) as well as an entirely new Theurgy system, an evolution of the weirdly handled Showtime mechanic from Persona 5’s Royal edition. These supermoves are all flashy and cool, and by the end of the game each character in your party has a couple to choose from, so it’s a fun little bit of strategy in deciding which Theury to use and when. All these additions risk making the game a bit too easy, but on Hard I thought it was a pretty balanced affair. Absolutely easier than the original releases, but not something you can entirely sleepwalk through. If you’re looking for a challenge more akin to the originals, Merciless is probably the way to go.
Script-wise, this remake is incredibly faithful. The vast majority of the original game’s script has been maintained pretty much word for word, with the most notable alteration being the much appreciated removal of the transphobic beach scene, which always stood out as gross even for 2006. This is a good thing, because by and large the original Persona 3’s script is quite good. Its characters are much more dynamic and volatile than their P4 and P5 counterparts, their growth during the story far more significant. Personas 4 and 5 have a problem with losing interest in its characters after their initial arc is over. Persona 3 is constantly giving its characters more things to do, with slight character arcs that can last for just a matter of weeks wedged neatly into an overarching story that lasts the majority of the game, from their introduction to the game’s final scenes. The real feather in Reload’s cap, then, are the new Linked Episodes. The PS2 releases of Persona 3 lacked Social Links for all male party members, and that’s been made up for here by giving each of these characters a new ‘hangout’ system, where they invite you to do something and then witness a brand new scene play out. These are neither as lowkey or as predictable (schedule-wise) as the game’s many Social Links, and I’d argue that these new Linked Episodes are among the very best content the game has to offer. The way these new scenes fit into the existing script to help flesh out the characters without flattening them or making their pre-existing scenes feel repetitive is a shocking feat, and the game is significantly better for the writing team’s ability to pull this off. In the future when I think about Persona 3’s characters, a lot of the moments that will spring to my mind first come from these Linked Scenes.
To truly live is to be willing to change. And we have to make those choices for ourselves.
As an adult, I felt a much stronger attachment than I expected to Shinjiro Aragaki. So many of the characters in this game are trapped in a rut, wondering if they’ll ever be able to escape the circumstances that leave them feeling powerless. Junpei, desperate to be great, lashing out against the system that has once again stuck him in the role of an underling and threatens to erase what makes him feel special, taking away everything he holds dear. Yukari, her blind faith in her father crashing down and leaving her aimless and uncertain. The vast majority of the game’s characters, friends and allies alike, experience being stuck in some emotional abscess that leaves them without direction and without escape. This is something that resonated with me, as someone who’s been struggling to break out of my own malaise for many years now, but it was Shinjiro’s portrayal that hit closest to home.. Unlike your other party members, whose aimless search for purpose is at least a search for purpose, Shinjiro has given up. Content to spend the rest of his life wallowing away in back alleys, refusing help no matter how desperately offered the people who care about him, Shinjiro is a loner by choice. He made a mistake a long time ago, and every moment of his life is a mixture of self loathing and twisted atonement. The new Linked Episodes here really flesh out his character, exploring the depths of both his own isolation and of his friend’s commitment to him. His struggle with people who only want what’s best for him and his own sincere belief that he deserves nothing but the gutter until he dies becomes the game’s most gripping and emotional subplot, and it makes its inevitable end all the more powerful. In a game that is often a bit more general and less cutting in its poignancy, I was surprised by how ‘seen’ I felt by these scenes. It got me thinking. I don’t have Shinjiro’s illness. I haven’t lost my family. What’s my excuse? If I don’t figure my shit out, I risk ending up just like him, hurting the people I care because I blinded myself into thinking I deserve some sad fate. In the end, Shinjiro finds his atonement, but the game makes it clear that it wasn’t worth it. Life is too short and too finite to spend locked in a cell of your own making. It’s a lot to consider, and that Persona 3 manages to make me grapple with my actual real life issues is what makes it a special game. You can tell that the people writing this were experienced in struggles like that, rather than just approximating it. It means something to me. It really motivates me to make some changes to my life, to be someone better in the very near-future. And thinking about my future inevitably got me thinking about my past, too.
Even if we’re apart, we’re still connected.
That first 2014 playthrough of Persona 3 FES occurred just after graduating high school. I played it with my friend in my basement during the summertime. Sometimes we’d be up all night. We’d make trips to 7/11 to get energy drinks to make sure we could make as much progress in a given night as possible. We’d order pizza, Chinese food, wings. Those were precious moments, cherished memories from so long ago now that it all feels like some distant dream. I knew going into Reload that it was going to be impossible not to think about it, but for a while it didn’t really strike me. Towards the end of the game, as I went through Aigis’ genuinely emotional Social Link, it all hit me at once. After that memorable summer, my friend and I grew distant. The people we became in the time since were no longer compatible, and I haven’t heard from him in well over five years. But playing Persona 3 Reload, there is no sadness, only warm nostalgia. He’s gone now, but the Him from the summertime of 2014 is always going to be there. Towards the end of the game, during one of your routine “teachers talking to you during class” segments, the teacher announces that she’s going to be moving away. She then thanks all of the students in her class by name, grateful for the year she’s spent with them. It’s a bizarrely moving moment, and not really one the game treats with any significance. I think that’s how I feel looking back at that summer, just appreciation that those days happened at all. Maybe I should call him sometime… but not before I become the kind of person that the me from back then would be proud of.
If you believe, you will be saved.
I really have no idea how I should score this thing. A 5/5 feels too generous, like every modern Persona it has blatant pacing issues in both the first and last fifth of the game. I ran out of meaningful things to do in the evenings by October, and by January I was basically going to the arcade to boost my Persona stats every single day. The qualities of its Social Links are a real mixed bag too, though I don’t think they’re as bad as some say. For the most part they’re at least entertaining enough to sit through, and I think a lot of them are genuinely funny as “high school dude” simulators. But you can tell they really had to stretch to get 10 scenes out of some of these, which doesn’t help an already over-long game. Likewise, while climbing Tartarus and fighting dudes has been made more entertaining than ever before, it’s still a climb up 250 samey rooms fighting the same 10 variants of 20 or so enemies. They’ve definitely spiced it up significantly, and I don’t really mind it much at all, but by the end you’re definitely left wondering if it couldn’t have been 50 floors shorter. At the same time, I again reflect on my 2014 self playing the game with a friend. All of these things that strike me now as feeling bloated or unnecessary were things that back then felt like astonishing surprises. Being younger and having more free time, not to mention being less skilled at managing my time in a game like this, I can imagine that barren January both having more stuff left to do and feeling downright magical due to the major vibe shift the game goes through. Hell, I have a vivid memory of ‘Memories of the City’ playing for the first time on New Years Day. My friend and I dropped the controller, listening to the song without a word, in awe at the game’s ability to totally bowl us over with its presentation so many hours in. All of these flaws are flaws, yes, but they’re also exacerbated by where I am in my life right now. They’re flaws that I thought were strengths a decade ago, because they WERE strengths a decade ago. It’s an impossible game for me to score, and I almost feel like a fraud for daring to try. Thankfully, the backlogg’d average for the game is exactly 4.5, so leaving it there feels like the right thing to do. It’s a special game.
The End almost doesn’t feel real…
So, now I’ve finished Persona 3 Reload. A game I’ve wanted to play for almost a decade now, dreaming of what could be. It isn’t exactly how I wanted it to be, but in many ways it’s better. It cannot be overstated how meaningful the Linked Episodes are as an addition to the game, not to mention the new study scenes and the like. And the new voice cast nails it too, seriously impressive work. It’s been a real journey for me, more than I thought it would be. It’s made me reflect on so much of the last ten years of my life, what’s been good, what’s been bad. What parts of me I should keep and what I should discard for the future. (Staying up until 1AM on a work night to write a review of a video game probably belongs in the latter category.) Frankly, now, at the end of it, I just feel… confused. But that’s okay. Towards the end of Persona 3, all of its characters are confused. They’re uncertain of themselves, of their purpose, of their reason for living. The emotions brought about by my circumstances playing Persona 3 Reload was reflected unknowingly by the game itself, making for one of the most remarkable video game playthroughs of my life so far. For the most part, its characters figured it out. They steeled themselves, and moved forward with conviction. It makes me feel confident that someday, I could maybe do the same.
Every passing day is an opportunity to make things better. No matter how minor the method or insignificant the growth, there is always something we can do. Whether that be something we do to help others or to change ourselves, or even just to have a good time. Our lives are so small, but we can cast such a wide net with the time we’re given. I’ve spent a long time not thinking about it. Figuring that I was cursed in some ways from the get-go, so why bother pushing for something better? Persona 3 Reload reminded me that this really is it, I’ll only ever get one chance to be this person. I still have time left to make that person the best it can be. I understand now that not using that time wisely is nothing more than an excuse to not care, and all that accomplishes is pain for everyone in my life. We all have to make the best of the time we get, and take advantage of every opportunity that we’re given. Opportunities for rest, for love, for joy. For the people we want to be, for the people we’ve lost along the way. For all the precious moments that we didn’t realize we should cherish.
Persona 3 released in 2006 for the Playstation 2. I played its 2007 re-release, Persona 3 FES, on the PS2 in 2014. I then played its 2009 re-release, Persona 3 Portable, on the PSP in 2016 and then again on the Nintendo Switch in 2023, though I didn’t finish either of those attempts. My PSP was stolen in a burglary during my first playthrough, and life got in the way during that second. By the time that modern platform port of Portable was released, reliable sources had already made it pretty apparent that we would be getting a modernized full remake of the game in the near future anyway, so I wasn’t too bothered to let it go. Since playing Persona 5 on its release, I’ve dreamt of a game like Reload. A version of Persona 3 that modernizes and enhances it, makes it look and play as good as 5 while maintaining the atmosphere and writing that made 3 my favorite in the franchise. Now that it’s here, it’s kind of surreal. Things have changed a lot in my life since I first played Persona 3, but at the same time, they haven’t changed at all. I’m still playing Persona, so really, how much better could things have gotten?
As a remake, Persona 3 Reload does leave a little bit to be desired, and I’m not referring to the content from FES and Portable that was cut (with The Answer apparently relegated to upcoming DLC.) It’s in the style. Persona 3’s PS2 versions had anime cutscenes that were unlike anything else out there at the time, and certainly unlike anything today. More Serial Experiments Lain than Spy x Family, the anime cutscenes in the original release were equal parts striking and bizarre. In Reload, these original scenes have been replaced by either a new, much less interesting anime cutscene, or a ‘pretty good’ in-engine replacement. Some of these in-engine scenes, particularly the one depicting Aragaki’s death, are quite good. But all of the new animated scenes lack the dark strangeness of their originals, and in a game this reliant on dark strangeness to build its atmosphere, that's a loss worth grieving. Still, that’s about all the negatives I have for Reload on the remake front. In every other category, it goes above and beyond. The visuals are largely excellent, and the stylish pop UI of Persona 5 has been translated wonderfully to the more slow and stoic Persona 3, all shades of blues and odd angles. The music has been faithfully rerecorded and remixed, and while some of these updated renditions took some getting used to they are by and large sideways leaps at the worst. Many stand tall over their initial renditions, and I feel comfortable calling Reload’s soundtrack the best in the franchise to date. Combat has gotten perhaps the biggest glowup, with the addition of P5’s Baton Pass mechanic (now called Shift) as well as an entirely new Theurgy system, an evolution of the weirdly handled Showtime mechanic from Persona 5’s Royal edition. These supermoves are all flashy and cool, and by the end of the game each character in your party has a couple to choose from, so it’s a fun little bit of strategy in deciding which Theury to use and when. All these additions risk making the game a bit too easy, but on Hard I thought it was a pretty balanced affair. Absolutely easier than the original releases, but not something you can entirely sleepwalk through. If you’re looking for a challenge more akin to the originals, Merciless is probably the way to go.
Script-wise, this remake is incredibly faithful. The vast majority of the original game’s script has been maintained pretty much word for word, with the most notable alteration being the much appreciated removal of the transphobic beach scene, which always stood out as gross even for 2006. This is a good thing, because by and large the original Persona 3’s script is quite good. Its characters are much more dynamic and volatile than their P4 and P5 counterparts, their growth during the story far more significant. Personas 4 and 5 have a problem with losing interest in its characters after their initial arc is over. Persona 3 is constantly giving its characters more things to do, with slight character arcs that can last for just a matter of weeks wedged neatly into an overarching story that lasts the majority of the game, from their introduction to the game’s final scenes. The real feather in Reload’s cap, then, are the new Linked Episodes. The PS2 releases of Persona 3 lacked Social Links for all male party members, and that’s been made up for here by giving each of these characters a new ‘hangout’ system, where they invite you to do something and then witness a brand new scene play out. These are neither as lowkey or as predictable (schedule-wise) as the game’s many Social Links, and I’d argue that these new Linked Episodes are among the very best content the game has to offer. The way these new scenes fit into the existing script to help flesh out the characters without flattening them or making their pre-existing scenes feel repetitive is a shocking feat, and the game is significantly better for the writing team’s ability to pull this off. In the future when I think about Persona 3’s characters, a lot of the moments that will spring to my mind first come from these Linked Scenes.
To truly live is to be willing to change. And we have to make those choices for ourselves.
As an adult, I felt a much stronger attachment than I expected to Shinjiro Aragaki. So many of the characters in this game are trapped in a rut, wondering if they’ll ever be able to escape the circumstances that leave them feeling powerless. Junpei, desperate to be great, lashing out against the system that has once again stuck him in the role of an underling and threatens to erase what makes him feel special, taking away everything he holds dear. Yukari, her blind faith in her father crashing down and leaving her aimless and uncertain. The vast majority of the game’s characters, friends and allies alike, experience being stuck in some emotional abscess that leaves them without direction and without escape. This is something that resonated with me, as someone who’s been struggling to break out of my own malaise for many years now, but it was Shinjiro’s portrayal that hit closest to home.. Unlike your other party members, whose aimless search for purpose is at least a search for purpose, Shinjiro has given up. Content to spend the rest of his life wallowing away in back alleys, refusing help no matter how desperately offered the people who care about him, Shinjiro is a loner by choice. He made a mistake a long time ago, and every moment of his life is a mixture of self loathing and twisted atonement. The new Linked Episodes here really flesh out his character, exploring the depths of both his own isolation and of his friend’s commitment to him. His struggle with people who only want what’s best for him and his own sincere belief that he deserves nothing but the gutter until he dies becomes the game’s most gripping and emotional subplot, and it makes its inevitable end all the more powerful. In a game that is often a bit more general and less cutting in its poignancy, I was surprised by how ‘seen’ I felt by these scenes. It got me thinking. I don’t have Shinjiro’s illness. I haven’t lost my family. What’s my excuse? If I don’t figure my shit out, I risk ending up just like him, hurting the people I care because I blinded myself into thinking I deserve some sad fate. In the end, Shinjiro finds his atonement, but the game makes it clear that it wasn’t worth it. Life is too short and too finite to spend locked in a cell of your own making. It’s a lot to consider, and that Persona 3 manages to make me grapple with my actual real life issues is what makes it a special game. You can tell that the people writing this were experienced in struggles like that, rather than just approximating it. It means something to me. It really motivates me to make some changes to my life, to be someone better in the very near-future. And thinking about my future inevitably got me thinking about my past, too.
Even if we’re apart, we’re still connected.
That first 2014 playthrough of Persona 3 FES occurred just after graduating high school. I played it with my friend in my basement during the summertime. Sometimes we’d be up all night. We’d make trips to 7/11 to get energy drinks to make sure we could make as much progress in a given night as possible. We’d order pizza, Chinese food, wings. Those were precious moments, cherished memories from so long ago now that it all feels like some distant dream. I knew going into Reload that it was going to be impossible not to think about it, but for a while it didn’t really strike me. Towards the end of the game, as I went through Aigis’ genuinely emotional Social Link, it all hit me at once. After that memorable summer, my friend and I grew distant. The people we became in the time since were no longer compatible, and I haven’t heard from him in well over five years. But playing Persona 3 Reload, there is no sadness, only warm nostalgia. He’s gone now, but the Him from the summertime of 2014 is always going to be there. Towards the end of the game, during one of your routine “teachers talking to you during class” segments, the teacher announces that she’s going to be moving away. She then thanks all of the students in her class by name, grateful for the year she’s spent with them. It’s a bizarrely moving moment, and not really one the game treats with any significance. I think that’s how I feel looking back at that summer, just appreciation that those days happened at all. Maybe I should call him sometime… but not before I become the kind of person that the me from back then would be proud of.
If you believe, you will be saved.
I really have no idea how I should score this thing. A 5/5 feels too generous, like every modern Persona it has blatant pacing issues in both the first and last fifth of the game. I ran out of meaningful things to do in the evenings by October, and by January I was basically going to the arcade to boost my Persona stats every single day. The qualities of its Social Links are a real mixed bag too, though I don’t think they’re as bad as some say. For the most part they’re at least entertaining enough to sit through, and I think a lot of them are genuinely funny as “high school dude” simulators. But you can tell they really had to stretch to get 10 scenes out of some of these, which doesn’t help an already over-long game. Likewise, while climbing Tartarus and fighting dudes has been made more entertaining than ever before, it’s still a climb up 250 samey rooms fighting the same 10 variants of 20 or so enemies. They’ve definitely spiced it up significantly, and I don’t really mind it much at all, but by the end you’re definitely left wondering if it couldn’t have been 50 floors shorter. At the same time, I again reflect on my 2014 self playing the game with a friend. All of these things that strike me now as feeling bloated or unnecessary were things that back then felt like astonishing surprises. Being younger and having more free time, not to mention being less skilled at managing my time in a game like this, I can imagine that barren January both having more stuff left to do and feeling downright magical due to the major vibe shift the game goes through. Hell, I have a vivid memory of ‘Memories of the City’ playing for the first time on New Years Day. My friend and I dropped the controller, listening to the song without a word, in awe at the game’s ability to totally bowl us over with its presentation so many hours in. All of these flaws are flaws, yes, but they’re also exacerbated by where I am in my life right now. They’re flaws that I thought were strengths a decade ago, because they WERE strengths a decade ago. It’s an impossible game for me to score, and I almost feel like a fraud for daring to try. Thankfully, the backlogg’d average for the game is exactly 4.5, so leaving it there feels like the right thing to do. It’s a special game.
The End almost doesn’t feel real…
So, now I’ve finished Persona 3 Reload. A game I’ve wanted to play for almost a decade now, dreaming of what could be. It isn’t exactly how I wanted it to be, but in many ways it’s better. It cannot be overstated how meaningful the Linked Episodes are as an addition to the game, not to mention the new study scenes and the like. And the new voice cast nails it too, seriously impressive work. It’s been a real journey for me, more than I thought it would be. It’s made me reflect on so much of the last ten years of my life, what’s been good, what’s been bad. What parts of me I should keep and what I should discard for the future. (Staying up until 1AM on a work night to write a review of a video game probably belongs in the latter category.) Frankly, now, at the end of it, I just feel… confused. But that’s okay. Towards the end of Persona 3, all of its characters are confused. They’re uncertain of themselves, of their purpose, of their reason for living. The emotions brought about by my circumstances playing Persona 3 Reload was reflected unknowingly by the game itself, making for one of the most remarkable video game playthroughs of my life so far. For the most part, its characters figured it out. They steeled themselves, and moved forward with conviction. It makes me feel confident that someday, I could maybe do the same.
Every passing day is an opportunity to make things better. No matter how minor the method or insignificant the growth, there is always something we can do. Whether that be something we do to help others or to change ourselves, or even just to have a good time. Our lives are so small, but we can cast such a wide net with the time we’re given. I’ve spent a long time not thinking about it. Figuring that I was cursed in some ways from the get-go, so why bother pushing for something better? Persona 3 Reload reminded me that this really is it, I’ll only ever get one chance to be this person. I still have time left to make that person the best it can be. I understand now that not using that time wisely is nothing more than an excuse to not care, and all that accomplishes is pain for everyone in my life. We all have to make the best of the time we get, and take advantage of every opportunity that we’re given. Opportunities for rest, for love, for joy. For the people we want to be, for the people we’ve lost along the way. For all the precious moments that we didn’t realize we should cherish.
There's a lot to be excited about with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Sands of Time and POP2008 were very important games to me growing up, but outside of a mostly warm replay of the former a couple years ago I haven't seen or really even thought much about the franchise since. Ubisoft has been on nothing short of a legendary downward spiral for the past decade or so, with the truly good and interesting games coming out of that giant being so few and far between that you'd be forgiven for thinking they were mirages. The Lost Crown is one of those, and most importantly it succeeds not just at being a great Metroidvania in its own right, but for bringing me back to the things I loved about these games as a kid.
It's not the story or the setting, which are both on the weaker side here. Mount Qaf is large and the actual level design is mostly strong - we'll get to that later - but it lacks a sense of place. It feels like a series of disconnected video game rooms stuck together mostly at random. They look nice and are fun to move through, but the game goes to great lengths to impress upon the player the history and legacy of Mount Qaf and the people who once inhabited it, and none of it worked for me. I tried, I read a lot of the early lore pickups and was intrigued by the friendship between Sargon and his cohorts and their grander relationship with Persia and its folklore. But nothing stuck, and by the midpoint I was more than happy to skip through text boxes barely skimming their contents.
It's fortunate, then, that these areas are a lot of fun to explore. Even fairly early in the game you come to grips with controlling Sargon and it feels good. Platforming in this game at its most basic is fluid, fast, and fun. As your moveset expands and you get abilities both familiar and unfamiliar to the genre, the game successfully settles into the late-game "fly through every room while backtracking" flow that all the greats do. Special shoutout to the sound effect while walljumping, which is very reminiscent to the hand-clapping sound effect from Sands of Time and made me smile almost every time I heard it. But good-feeling platforming isn't much fun if there's not much jumping to be done. Thankfully, The Lost Crown has plenty of platforming challenges, both in main progression and in optional gauntlets. Every 30 minutes in this game you're running into a mini Path of Pain, and I loved it. Some of these things had my hands sweating like the final level of Mario Wonder, the only bummer for me being that the game's final challenges are entirely combat focused. The game has some very good hidden platforming challenges but when it comes time to wrap up and really test your knowledge, they hold back - presumably so that players less versed in platforming are able to see the game through. It's a bummer.
Combat is good though, much better than in Hollow Knight, the game's closest contemporary. Silksong has its work cut out for it to match this. The Lost Crown frequently feels like they took some of Devil May Cry's stylish launcher-focused combat and put it into 2D and it works extremely well. Closest comparison I can think of is Dishwasher Dead Samurai, if you know you know.
The game looks nice and runs mostly well. I played on Switch, because I hate myself, and I'd say the portability was well worth the trade off. I had a few hitches when things got super crazy, but they were very few and far between in a game I spent 20 hours in. Not a dealbreaker at all. A bigger issue for me were the bugs, which by the end of the game were popping up very frequently. Multiple hardcrashes, loading zones breaking, even old cutscenes playing when crossing a trigger that should've been deleted. It's hard to say whether or not any of that is Switch specific or if the game just launched hot, and none of it was a serious issue, but it definitely gave me the feeling that the game was falling apart the further in I was getting.
Pacing is probably the game's biggest single issue. The game's actual structure is pretty good, smartly laying out mandatory questlines that take you all over its enormous map and dotting it with fun sidequests. A lot of these sidequests take the form of finding specific collectables on the world map, and it always feels awesome to be exploring an area and stumble across one of these items and check them off the list. I finished the game with 97% completion, only missing 3 items. The memory shard feature that lets you take in-game screenshots on the map of areas to come back to is fantastic and I can't imagine a future game in this genre without it, but it's a shame the game doesn't mark uncollected (or even collected) items on your map by the end of the game. Some of these areas are so huge and their traversal such a chore that the prospect of combing them all again for the final few trinkets was too daunting to bear. A lot of individual rooms in the game are fun to go through, but they're all made to be a challenge in a certain way. This means going through the same challenge tens of times while backtracking and looking for secrets, which gets old fast. Fast travel points are few and the distance between them can vary from two rooms apart to sometimes 20 rooms apart. The size and layout of The Lost Crown makes cleanup a much bigger chore than recent standouts like Metroid Dread, and that's ultimately the game's biggest fault.
Still, for all its issues, this is still a very good Metroidvania. Memory Shards are one of the greatest advances in Metroidvania game design in ages, and many of the individual boss fights, puzzles, and platforming challenges are very fun to go through. But when you're running through the same platform challenge for the 15th time on the off-chance that there might be a boring lore item that you missed, the sheen wears off. Here's hoping the team gets another crack at a game like this, because at its brightest The Lost Crown is full of sequences so good that I'll be remembering them when it comes time to put together my year-end list.
Oh, I forgot to mention the music. That should tell you all you need to know. And I really liked Dread's OST!
It's not the story or the setting, which are both on the weaker side here. Mount Qaf is large and the actual level design is mostly strong - we'll get to that later - but it lacks a sense of place. It feels like a series of disconnected video game rooms stuck together mostly at random. They look nice and are fun to move through, but the game goes to great lengths to impress upon the player the history and legacy of Mount Qaf and the people who once inhabited it, and none of it worked for me. I tried, I read a lot of the early lore pickups and was intrigued by the friendship between Sargon and his cohorts and their grander relationship with Persia and its folklore. But nothing stuck, and by the midpoint I was more than happy to skip through text boxes barely skimming their contents.
It's fortunate, then, that these areas are a lot of fun to explore. Even fairly early in the game you come to grips with controlling Sargon and it feels good. Platforming in this game at its most basic is fluid, fast, and fun. As your moveset expands and you get abilities both familiar and unfamiliar to the genre, the game successfully settles into the late-game "fly through every room while backtracking" flow that all the greats do. Special shoutout to the sound effect while walljumping, which is very reminiscent to the hand-clapping sound effect from Sands of Time and made me smile almost every time I heard it. But good-feeling platforming isn't much fun if there's not much jumping to be done. Thankfully, The Lost Crown has plenty of platforming challenges, both in main progression and in optional gauntlets. Every 30 minutes in this game you're running into a mini Path of Pain, and I loved it. Some of these things had my hands sweating like the final level of Mario Wonder, the only bummer for me being that the game's final challenges are entirely combat focused. The game has some very good hidden platforming challenges but when it comes time to wrap up and really test your knowledge, they hold back - presumably so that players less versed in platforming are able to see the game through. It's a bummer.
Combat is good though, much better than in Hollow Knight, the game's closest contemporary. Silksong has its work cut out for it to match this. The Lost Crown frequently feels like they took some of Devil May Cry's stylish launcher-focused combat and put it into 2D and it works extremely well. Closest comparison I can think of is Dishwasher Dead Samurai, if you know you know.
The game looks nice and runs mostly well. I played on Switch, because I hate myself, and I'd say the portability was well worth the trade off. I had a few hitches when things got super crazy, but they were very few and far between in a game I spent 20 hours in. Not a dealbreaker at all. A bigger issue for me were the bugs, which by the end of the game were popping up very frequently. Multiple hardcrashes, loading zones breaking, even old cutscenes playing when crossing a trigger that should've been deleted. It's hard to say whether or not any of that is Switch specific or if the game just launched hot, and none of it was a serious issue, but it definitely gave me the feeling that the game was falling apart the further in I was getting.
Pacing is probably the game's biggest single issue. The game's actual structure is pretty good, smartly laying out mandatory questlines that take you all over its enormous map and dotting it with fun sidequests. A lot of these sidequests take the form of finding specific collectables on the world map, and it always feels awesome to be exploring an area and stumble across one of these items and check them off the list. I finished the game with 97% completion, only missing 3 items. The memory shard feature that lets you take in-game screenshots on the map of areas to come back to is fantastic and I can't imagine a future game in this genre without it, but it's a shame the game doesn't mark uncollected (or even collected) items on your map by the end of the game. Some of these areas are so huge and their traversal such a chore that the prospect of combing them all again for the final few trinkets was too daunting to bear. A lot of individual rooms in the game are fun to go through, but they're all made to be a challenge in a certain way. This means going through the same challenge tens of times while backtracking and looking for secrets, which gets old fast. Fast travel points are few and the distance between them can vary from two rooms apart to sometimes 20 rooms apart. The size and layout of The Lost Crown makes cleanup a much bigger chore than recent standouts like Metroid Dread, and that's ultimately the game's biggest fault.
Still, for all its issues, this is still a very good Metroidvania. Memory Shards are one of the greatest advances in Metroidvania game design in ages, and many of the individual boss fights, puzzles, and platforming challenges are very fun to go through. But when you're running through the same platform challenge for the 15th time on the off-chance that there might be a boring lore item that you missed, the sheen wears off. Here's hoping the team gets another crack at a game like this, because at its brightest The Lost Crown is full of sequences so good that I'll be remembering them when it comes time to put together my year-end list.
Oh, I forgot to mention the music. That should tell you all you need to know. And I really liked Dread's OST!
2001
“Everyone has lost something precious. Everyone has lost homes, dreams, and friends. We can make new homes for ourselves, and new dreams. But the people and friends we have lost, the dreams that have faded. Never forget them.”
In 2000, with the Playstation 2 already released, Squaresoft released Final Fantasy IX for the Playstation 1. A grand adventure full of obtuse side content and immaculate presentation, FF9 felt like the culmination of generations of experience making these games. A year later, Final Fantasy X arrived for the Playstation 2, beginning a new era for the franchise that took all those lessons learned and used them to pivot the franchise into an exciting new direction. One that clearly owed thematically and structurally to its predecessors, but that wasn’t afraid to excise and build until it felt so much like its own thing that a new Final Fantasy was able to feel truly fresh. And it paid off in spades, because Final Fantasy X is maybe the single truest 3D masterpiece of the franchise.
The key differences with FFX and what came before it lie in the nitty gritty of its gameplay approach. Most notably, the ATB system that had been iterated on so prominently for the last several entries has been entirely replaced by a more traditional turn based system. Characters get EXP for participating in battle, but you can only have three in battle at a time. Every character has a specific use-case, and where the game brings it all together is in its switching system. You can switch an active character with anyone else in your roster on their turn, and the switched character will still get to act. This is brilliant, and battles will often center around figuring out when a certain character needs to use a specific maneuver against an enemy and swapping around to capitalize. Using Tidus to cast Slow on flying enemies that can petrify your party, then swapping over to Wakka who specializes in taking down flying enemies and taking them all out before they can move. It’s a really snappy system and it feels very good to play. After the molasses slowness of FF9’s take on ATB, FFX feels like a colossal readjustment for the better in every conceivable way.
The other significant changes are with the leveling system and the gear system. I won’t go as in-depth with these mechanics, just know that it’s all in the service of allowing the player to truly customize their experience. Traditional level ups have been replaced with an insane gigantic skill tree, with each level giving a character a single move along the tree. This allows you to pick and choose how you want to progress your characters - make your white mage the strongest physical attacker on the team, turn your nimble protagonist into a Vivi-tier black mage, do whatever the hell you want. Coupled with the new gear system, which completely removes stats from equipment and focuses entirely on passive buffs, mastery and excessive play can allow you to essentially turn your entire party into invincible demigods that turn every fight into a joke. But it’s a long journey there.
Narratively, Final Fantasy X centers around a pilgrimage. A few great characters, traveling together on a journey to a specific destination, making a few necessary stops along the way. FFX’s most obvious difference in world design from the games that came before is its linearity, but because of this narrative structure it feels kind of hard to fault it. Of course you’re going down straight linear paths - you are doing a tried and true journey and following in the footsteps of your forebears. It’s definitely an early mark against the game regardless, but I think this narrative conceit is the reason people are less harsh on FFX for this as opposed to, say, FFXIII. The game also does a great job pacing itself, every long linear path is usually punctuated with some sort of switch-up, whether that be a series of intense boss fights, a dungeon, a puzzle sequence, or some awful underwater soccer. There’s enough variety to keep things fresh despite the repetition of its general level progression, which is a huge boon that helps wipe away some of the disappointment from the lack of freedom.
Towards the very end of the game, it opens up substantially. Once you can go wherever you want whenever you want, suddenly there are a million things to do. Many of them are annoying, many of them are obtuse, and many of them are difficult. I didn’t do all of them, but I did go through the hassle of acquiring everybody’s Celestial Weapon and all of the Aeons. And while dodging 200 lightning bolts and playing like six hours of Blitzball did suck, that’s kind of… the fun? It’s an impossible feeling to describe, but there’s something about overcoming an obtuse and ridiculous challenge and getting rewarded by becoming so strong you can sleep through endgame superbosses that makes you feel incredibly accomplished. It’s sort of like the game’s own narrative structure - journey through something painful to experience a relaxing calm.
What a wonderful journey it is, too. Final Fantasy X tells possibly the single greatest story in the franchise, with a unique and well thought out world populated with interesting characters. Not all of them get tons of development, but they don’t have to. They all serve a role in both battle and the group dynamic, and they’re great to have around. When they do have a role in the narrative - and they all do - it’s always done with tenderness and weight. And I think that’s the best way to describe the game’s story and script: tender and heavy. So many great individual lines, individual moments, individual scenes. The early PS2-era animation and voice acting cruft largely wears off early on, so by the time you’re getting to the seriously impactful scenes you are all in, and the actors are doing great work. Tidus especially is given a lot of work to do, and actor James Arnold Taylor is able to pull it all off. From confident braggadocio to covert sadness to out and out despair, he’s able to make it all work. Even the infamous laugh scene works well in context and is called back to many hours later in a way that felt genuinely moving. I have no complaints about the narrative, which trucks along at a pretty good pace and ends perfectly. No notes.
So what we have here is a Final Fantasy for fans and first timers, one that reinvents so many aspects of the series while maintaining the core of its soul. Through its excellent storytelling, phenomenal soundtrack, and deep gameplay it marks itself as possibly the single greatest rpg of its era and easily one of the top Final Fantasy games.
I never want to play Blitzball again.
In 2000, with the Playstation 2 already released, Squaresoft released Final Fantasy IX for the Playstation 1. A grand adventure full of obtuse side content and immaculate presentation, FF9 felt like the culmination of generations of experience making these games. A year later, Final Fantasy X arrived for the Playstation 2, beginning a new era for the franchise that took all those lessons learned and used them to pivot the franchise into an exciting new direction. One that clearly owed thematically and structurally to its predecessors, but that wasn’t afraid to excise and build until it felt so much like its own thing that a new Final Fantasy was able to feel truly fresh. And it paid off in spades, because Final Fantasy X is maybe the single truest 3D masterpiece of the franchise.
The key differences with FFX and what came before it lie in the nitty gritty of its gameplay approach. Most notably, the ATB system that had been iterated on so prominently for the last several entries has been entirely replaced by a more traditional turn based system. Characters get EXP for participating in battle, but you can only have three in battle at a time. Every character has a specific use-case, and where the game brings it all together is in its switching system. You can switch an active character with anyone else in your roster on their turn, and the switched character will still get to act. This is brilliant, and battles will often center around figuring out when a certain character needs to use a specific maneuver against an enemy and swapping around to capitalize. Using Tidus to cast Slow on flying enemies that can petrify your party, then swapping over to Wakka who specializes in taking down flying enemies and taking them all out before they can move. It’s a really snappy system and it feels very good to play. After the molasses slowness of FF9’s take on ATB, FFX feels like a colossal readjustment for the better in every conceivable way.
The other significant changes are with the leveling system and the gear system. I won’t go as in-depth with these mechanics, just know that it’s all in the service of allowing the player to truly customize their experience. Traditional level ups have been replaced with an insane gigantic skill tree, with each level giving a character a single move along the tree. This allows you to pick and choose how you want to progress your characters - make your white mage the strongest physical attacker on the team, turn your nimble protagonist into a Vivi-tier black mage, do whatever the hell you want. Coupled with the new gear system, which completely removes stats from equipment and focuses entirely on passive buffs, mastery and excessive play can allow you to essentially turn your entire party into invincible demigods that turn every fight into a joke. But it’s a long journey there.
Narratively, Final Fantasy X centers around a pilgrimage. A few great characters, traveling together on a journey to a specific destination, making a few necessary stops along the way. FFX’s most obvious difference in world design from the games that came before is its linearity, but because of this narrative structure it feels kind of hard to fault it. Of course you’re going down straight linear paths - you are doing a tried and true journey and following in the footsteps of your forebears. It’s definitely an early mark against the game regardless, but I think this narrative conceit is the reason people are less harsh on FFX for this as opposed to, say, FFXIII. The game also does a great job pacing itself, every long linear path is usually punctuated with some sort of switch-up, whether that be a series of intense boss fights, a dungeon, a puzzle sequence, or some awful underwater soccer. There’s enough variety to keep things fresh despite the repetition of its general level progression, which is a huge boon that helps wipe away some of the disappointment from the lack of freedom.
Towards the very end of the game, it opens up substantially. Once you can go wherever you want whenever you want, suddenly there are a million things to do. Many of them are annoying, many of them are obtuse, and many of them are difficult. I didn’t do all of them, but I did go through the hassle of acquiring everybody’s Celestial Weapon and all of the Aeons. And while dodging 200 lightning bolts and playing like six hours of Blitzball did suck, that’s kind of… the fun? It’s an impossible feeling to describe, but there’s something about overcoming an obtuse and ridiculous challenge and getting rewarded by becoming so strong you can sleep through endgame superbosses that makes you feel incredibly accomplished. It’s sort of like the game’s own narrative structure - journey through something painful to experience a relaxing calm.
What a wonderful journey it is, too. Final Fantasy X tells possibly the single greatest story in the franchise, with a unique and well thought out world populated with interesting characters. Not all of them get tons of development, but they don’t have to. They all serve a role in both battle and the group dynamic, and they’re great to have around. When they do have a role in the narrative - and they all do - it’s always done with tenderness and weight. And I think that’s the best way to describe the game’s story and script: tender and heavy. So many great individual lines, individual moments, individual scenes. The early PS2-era animation and voice acting cruft largely wears off early on, so by the time you’re getting to the seriously impactful scenes you are all in, and the actors are doing great work. Tidus especially is given a lot of work to do, and actor James Arnold Taylor is able to pull it all off. From confident braggadocio to covert sadness to out and out despair, he’s able to make it all work. Even the infamous laugh scene works well in context and is called back to many hours later in a way that felt genuinely moving. I have no complaints about the narrative, which trucks along at a pretty good pace and ends perfectly. No notes.
So what we have here is a Final Fantasy for fans and first timers, one that reinvents so many aspects of the series while maintaining the core of its soul. Through its excellent storytelling, phenomenal soundtrack, and deep gameplay it marks itself as possibly the single greatest rpg of its era and easily one of the top Final Fantasy games.
I never want to play Blitzball again.
2017
What a game. Its script gets a bit messy by the end with all the ideas being juggled, but it's an exceptionally strong game with some of the most potent and poignant moments in the history of Final Fantasy. Its pacing is fantastic, constantly switching up what you're doing and who you're doing it with. The music is among the best in the franchise. The battles, while certainly slow, are enjoyable and some of the throughline boss fights stride the perfect line between challenging strategy and simple wins. There's so much to love here.
The side content is generally pretty annoying though. The worst of the worst of PSX era nonsense, completely RNG based tedious minigames and slow combing of a large map for nigh-invisible pixels. Don't bother with all that and you'll have a much better time. As a start to finish journey with minimal mucking about, FFIX is hard to argue with. A stone cold RPG classic and one of the mandatory FF games for anyone trying to worm their way through the series.
The side content is generally pretty annoying though. The worst of the worst of PSX era nonsense, completely RNG based tedious minigames and slow combing of a large map for nigh-invisible pixels. Don't bother with all that and you'll have a much better time. As a start to finish journey with minimal mucking about, FFIX is hard to argue with. A stone cold RPG classic and one of the mandatory FF games for anyone trying to worm their way through the series.
2023
An improvement over the first game in every conceivable way. Its writing isn't significantly better, and its pacing still suffers significantly when getting to new characters. But the dungeons are all fun to explore, and most importantly its bosses present very fun and varied challenges. The soundtrack is outstanding, best of 2023. And the way the game teases little pieces of the plot that all come together for the final sequence is genuinely an impressive bit of worldbuilding and game design. Final boss feels way too difficult, but I understand that it's a challenge for the JRPG freaks who actually want to teambuild and engage with the game's systems to their limits. Hard to do better than this for a JRPG in 2023. Masterclass.
2023
First time player here, always heard about Mario RPG. I think the thing I enjoyed most about this game is oddly its age. The way Mario feels, the snappiness of the story and dialogue, the ridiculous extra challenges like getting the Super Suit and how obtuse and annoying things like the Toadofsky songs are... it's all so 1996 in a way that brings a smile to my face. The music is great, the visuals are charming, and I sure did like Mallow a hell of a lot more than I expected to. Battles were mindnumbingly easy but the chain system and how fast everything was made it an extremely relaxing comfort-game experience... I just had a darn good time with this thing! Its slightness and clunkiness made the game much more enjoyable than it would have been if it were a grander, more polished adventure. I love a good RE4-style ground-up big-balls modernization remake, but this is great too. I hope more remakes in the future decide to just... be the old game, but shiny. It's homely.
2023
Extremely funny and scary in equal measure, with some fantastic game design at its core. Missing longterm progression, but that matters little when a session is this fun.
2023
Never has a game like this been made before, and never could a game like this be made until now.
That hasn't stopped Remedy from trying though. Ever since the original Max Payne their efforts to blend cinematic gameplay with storytelling devices that are trademarks of non-gaming mediums has been apparent. Sometimes for the better, like Max Payne and Control, and sometimes for the worse like in Quantum Break. Every game, they've pushed further and further, trying different tactics to marry disparate elements into a cohesive whole that punches above its weight because of the sheer force of its combined elements. With Alan Wake II, for the first time, they have succeeded.
Alan Wake II, most importantly, plays well. It's a genuinely good survival horror game with weighty combat and tense situations. The enemy variety leaves a little to be desired, but there really isn't a whole lot of combat in the game overall so it winds up not really marring the experience too much. Even on Hard Mode resources felt too plentiful, and I had a shoebox full of flares and excess med kits by the time my journey was over, but limited inventory space meant that I could never reliably have too much on me at one time which kept the actual battles nerve-wracking and tense. Some of the early bosses are great examples of this, particularly Nightingale and Cynthia.
This game is also scary as HELL. One of the best looking and sounding game's ever made, Remedy shows no restraint with the scares here. From dreadful buildups of atmosphere, to enemies surprising you from around corners, to straight up screen-filling deafeningly loud jumpscares, every type of scare is here and they are used to great effect. The game is utterly overwhelming in its employment of horror, like Resident Evil 2 Remake mixed with a giallo, and it keeps the player engaged and terrified during every moment of its 30ish hour narrative. And yet while the game rubs up against being "too long," it's smart enough to thrust you into the endgame and change up the flow of gameplay right when you're ready for what you're doing to end. It's a long slow burn, but one that plays to the strengths of that style of pacing and doesn't fall apart the way many games like it do. Some of the most disturbing and inventive sequences are saved for the endgame, with similarly terrifying and memorable moments sprinkled in from start to finish. The game will let you get bored if you just wander around for trinkets every time the option opens up to you, though I felt the game was very good about clueing you in on when you should actually be going back around to locations via both story progression and item procurements. It's an extremely smartly designed game - a blessing after Control fumbled some of its metroidvania elements.
Writing-wise, Alan Wake II is probably 2023's best game. Baldur's Gate 3 has more writing, and better developed characters, but Alan Wake II has what I'm looking for: that headswimming shit that sticks in you and makes you perceive the game's visuals and audio in new ways. Seeing the light of the FBC's bunker on Cauldron Lake flashing the tops of trees caused me to flashback to the very beginning of the game where you see a similar visual employed in the game's first overlap. Little things like this are littered all throughout the game in both its dialogue and its visual design, leading an inventive player to pin up case boards in their own Mind Place to try to sort through the weeds of the game's many themes. It's plot actually gets a little too explained for me by the end, but Remedy was smart enough to dangle many more mysteries in front of us with the very end of the game to keep us thinking and wanting more.
I spent most of Alan Wake II loving it but thinking it was one of the least replayable games in recent memory. After finishing it, I'm foaming at the mouth for New Game+ to be added in a future update so I can go back in and experience it again. It's not often that a 30 hour narrative adventure with minimal combat can accomplish that feat, and that AW2 pulls it off is a real testament to its writing and inventiveness. I want to spend more time in Bright Falls. I just need a good reason. I wasn't as big on Control as most people were, and the first Alan Wake definitely shows its age now even more than many other 2010 games do. But with its sequel, Remedy has finally made THE Remedy game, and cracked their own future wide open. They have become one of video game's premium developers, and Sam Lake one of its great auteurs. I hope this road keeps looping for a long time to come.
That hasn't stopped Remedy from trying though. Ever since the original Max Payne their efforts to blend cinematic gameplay with storytelling devices that are trademarks of non-gaming mediums has been apparent. Sometimes for the better, like Max Payne and Control, and sometimes for the worse like in Quantum Break. Every game, they've pushed further and further, trying different tactics to marry disparate elements into a cohesive whole that punches above its weight because of the sheer force of its combined elements. With Alan Wake II, for the first time, they have succeeded.
Alan Wake II, most importantly, plays well. It's a genuinely good survival horror game with weighty combat and tense situations. The enemy variety leaves a little to be desired, but there really isn't a whole lot of combat in the game overall so it winds up not really marring the experience too much. Even on Hard Mode resources felt too plentiful, and I had a shoebox full of flares and excess med kits by the time my journey was over, but limited inventory space meant that I could never reliably have too much on me at one time which kept the actual battles nerve-wracking and tense. Some of the early bosses are great examples of this, particularly Nightingale and Cynthia.
This game is also scary as HELL. One of the best looking and sounding game's ever made, Remedy shows no restraint with the scares here. From dreadful buildups of atmosphere, to enemies surprising you from around corners, to straight up screen-filling deafeningly loud jumpscares, every type of scare is here and they are used to great effect. The game is utterly overwhelming in its employment of horror, like Resident Evil 2 Remake mixed with a giallo, and it keeps the player engaged and terrified during every moment of its 30ish hour narrative. And yet while the game rubs up against being "too long," it's smart enough to thrust you into the endgame and change up the flow of gameplay right when you're ready for what you're doing to end. It's a long slow burn, but one that plays to the strengths of that style of pacing and doesn't fall apart the way many games like it do. Some of the most disturbing and inventive sequences are saved for the endgame, with similarly terrifying and memorable moments sprinkled in from start to finish. The game will let you get bored if you just wander around for trinkets every time the option opens up to you, though I felt the game was very good about clueing you in on when you should actually be going back around to locations via both story progression and item procurements. It's an extremely smartly designed game - a blessing after Control fumbled some of its metroidvania elements.
Writing-wise, Alan Wake II is probably 2023's best game. Baldur's Gate 3 has more writing, and better developed characters, but Alan Wake II has what I'm looking for: that headswimming shit that sticks in you and makes you perceive the game's visuals and audio in new ways. Seeing the light of the FBC's bunker on Cauldron Lake flashing the tops of trees caused me to flashback to the very beginning of the game where you see a similar visual employed in the game's first overlap. Little things like this are littered all throughout the game in both its dialogue and its visual design, leading an inventive player to pin up case boards in their own Mind Place to try to sort through the weeds of the game's many themes. It's plot actually gets a little too explained for me by the end, but Remedy was smart enough to dangle many more mysteries in front of us with the very end of the game to keep us thinking and wanting more.
I spent most of Alan Wake II loving it but thinking it was one of the least replayable games in recent memory. After finishing it, I'm foaming at the mouth for New Game+ to be added in a future update so I can go back in and experience it again. It's not often that a 30 hour narrative adventure with minimal combat can accomplish that feat, and that AW2 pulls it off is a real testament to its writing and inventiveness. I want to spend more time in Bright Falls. I just need a good reason. I wasn't as big on Control as most people were, and the first Alan Wake definitely shows its age now even more than many other 2010 games do. But with its sequel, Remedy has finally made THE Remedy game, and cracked their own future wide open. They have become one of video game's premium developers, and Sam Lake one of its great auteurs. I hope this road keeps looping for a long time to come.
As average as average gets. Sometimes it looks really good and the set pieces are fun, but it's as cookie cutter as it gets and fun traversal can only keep a game great for so long. Plays very sloppily, very buggy (I softlocked SEVEN times) and the script is boring and pacing is bad. There are highlight moments for sure, but not enough to save this from being anything other than a mediocre timewaster.
"Everything in this world has a writing credit."
One of the best games of the decade and the best Investigation game ever made. The script is brilliant, the soundtrack is incredible, and the game feels so complete thematically that it puts most video games to shame. It's the best ending to a franchise in video game history.
Also, Miu can kill me
One of the best games of the decade and the best Investigation game ever made. The script is brilliant, the soundtrack is incredible, and the game feels so complete thematically that it puts most video games to shame. It's the best ending to a franchise in video game history.
Also, Miu can kill me
It's hard to even know what to say.
Super Mario Wonder is the pinnacle of the design ethos Nintendo has spent almost 50 years crafting. Every level is a different joy. The core mechanics are hyper-polished and it's fun to just move around. There's a ton of stuff to collect, many different challenges to overcome, and many different abilities to employ as you set about overcoming them. I like to write longer reviews when a game really speak to me, but I'm flummoxed here. Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a game made by infinitely creative people with all the resources in the world to bring their ideas to life, and then all the time they needed to whittle and hone until it didn't have anything that didn't need to be there. I guess I'd have liked a few less textbox houses, but in the face of the awesome accomplishment that is all these amazing levels and ideas, I'd have to be a real asshole to whine about 4 minutes of dialogue skipping.
An unbelievable achievement that will be special in the hearts of just as many people as World was before it. Maybe more. It's the new top of the flagpole.
Super Mario Wonder is the pinnacle of the design ethos Nintendo has spent almost 50 years crafting. Every level is a different joy. The core mechanics are hyper-polished and it's fun to just move around. There's a ton of stuff to collect, many different challenges to overcome, and many different abilities to employ as you set about overcoming them. I like to write longer reviews when a game really speak to me, but I'm flummoxed here. Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a game made by infinitely creative people with all the resources in the world to bring their ideas to life, and then all the time they needed to whittle and hone until it didn't have anything that didn't need to be there. I guess I'd have liked a few less textbox houses, but in the face of the awesome accomplishment that is all these amazing levels and ideas, I'd have to be a real asshole to whine about 4 minutes of dialogue skipping.
An unbelievable achievement that will be special in the hearts of just as many people as World was before it. Maybe more. It's the new top of the flagpole.