Been sitting on this one for years, but finally played it. I'm glad I did, because while I don't have fond memories of the original, I really enjoyed my time with Zodiac Age. The secret to enjoying this game is removing Vaan from your party and pretending that nearly anyone else is the main character.

Joking aside, this game has a strong cast of characters, both heroes and villains. Sometimes the story falls a little flat and does a disservice to these characters, but overall it's a solid piece of storytelling.

The music is incredible with a good number of memorable themes. I feel the imperial theme is one of the strongest reasons people compare this game to Star Wars.

Combat is excellent and you're rewarded for how much work you put in. You can completely ignore the gambit system if you want, but I found it fun tweaking the system to get the best performance out of it. I did have a problem with the sheer amount of status effects the enemies loved to throw at the party, and the final area was more frustrating than enjoyable, but they made some great improvements over the original and this is well worth playing.

A good RPG that has aged remarkably well. There are a few hiccups I had, with some quests being failed because I talked to the wrong person or entered the wrong room. Also, sometimes you're separated from your group for a bit and those areas can be really punishing depending on the class you picked.

Combat was really fun, especially against the large monsters, and I really liked each class I played. There were times where combat took an absurd difficulty spike. There was a group of bandits right outside a wooded area that drove me insane with how they just seemed to ignore damage at times. I liked most of the NPCs. I did find it frustrating that there were times I had to look up in a wiki where to continue certain NPC quests, but that wasn't too bad.

This was a solid game and I'm excited to see what changes they've added for the sequel.

A fantastic remake of one of my favorite games. It's a fun return to a simpler time when RPGs didn't bloat themselves out with a pointlessly large map and needless side quests to slow down your progress in order to justify their existence. This is not a long game, I beat it in less than 15 hours and did plenty of the optional side quests. This game is endlessly charming and absolutely worth a revisit if you had played the original, or if you missed out on the original, then this is a great opportunity to play a classic game for the first time.

This game is a let down. There is a lot to like about it, but the game feels all over the place. Some levels are fun, others are a chore. A lot of the wonder flower parts were genuinely a delight and put a big smile on my face, but the rest of the game felt so painfully average for a Mario game. The difficulty is also randomized. The hardest levels were in the earliest parts of the game and the final levels felt like a breeze. The final level, Bowser's Castle, had a 5-star difficulty rating, and it was by far one of the easiest levels. I had higher hopes for this one and just didn't care for it. I don't hate it, but I have no desire to replay it. I have never not wanted to go back and get all the things I missed in a Mario game, until now.

This game is a mess of glitches and unfinished quests. 1.0 came out recently, but it really should have been labeled 0.7. I have heard that the devs were forced to keep the 11/17 release date due to the publisher, Humble Games, going through rough financial times, but that doesn't excuse the radio silence they have gone on and multiple ways they have screwed over their original backers by doing things like changing the PS4 version of the game to the PS5 and refusing to let people change the version they picked over 2 years ago. There are numerous quests with "TBD" on them and won't let you finish them. The NPC dialog is repetitious and doesn't change regardless of how far you progress your relationships. When the game crashes, and it will crash often, the Unreal crash reporter will also crash forcing you to restart your computer. I really wanted to like this game, and it still has a lot of potential. I plan on picking it back up in about half a year or so to see if the devs bothered to fix anything.

Easily the best single player Call of Duty campaign, and quite possibly one of the best FPS games ever. It does not get 5 stars though, simply because it still struggles with the kill boxes that all CoD single player campaigns struggle with, where regardless of what you try, you get repeatedly surrounded and gunned down by enemies you never see coming.

That said, the story and the pacing, as well as the gun play, are all top notch. I don't care for multiplayer, so I haven't touched it, but the single player is well worth the time.

I played through this when it first came out, but never played any of the improvements they made or the DLC, even though I had purchased it at the time. While waiting on FF16's price to come down, I decided to finally replay this and it's safe to say that I now adore this game. Is it perfect? No. It is flawed and at times frustrating, but I love it anyway.

It's a weird contradiction of a game where different ideas that are all great on their own never really come together. The idea of going on a chill road trip with your friends, going camping, fishing, hunting, exploring, all of that is so great and it works so well in this game, if you ignore the fact that the world is ending and Noctus is in a rush to find and save his childhood friend turned fiancé Luna.

The improvements and changes to the game are vast. I love being able to swap to different characters during combat now and really enjoy the fact that they all played differently. The DLC for each of the retainers was a lot of fun, and changed the retainers from a group of guys into people with depth and character. In particular, I loved Ignis's DLC. He went from being the pretty boy chef/driver to my favorite character in the game. They also expanded on some of the shorter endgame chapters. Instead of rushing to the palace in chapter 14, you now have the option to explore the city and do side quests, as well as a new optional hard boss. They showed this game a lot of love post launch and it made my second playthrough a very enjoyable experience.

That said, there are still some quirks. For some reason they mapped the jump button to the same button as the command prompt. I can't tell you how many times Noctus would jump when I was trying to pick up an item or interact with an NPC because it happened nearly every single time. Also, they didn't expand the final chapters enough. Right after the time skip, you run into an old friend and he tells you all about your old allies and what they're up to. You never see them though. That is a huge disappointment to me. I want to see an interact with these people, not just hear about them.

All in all, I really enjoyed this game and am glad I got to sit down to play it again.

It's a shame the game is in the state that it's in. If they had polished it some more, it would be one of my favorite games. Excluding the bugs, there's just so many parts left feeling unfinished. For starters, there is a part where two of the characters get married. After you help them get together, you see a short cutscene of her saying yes and then kissing him, but after that, there is nothing at all. There is no wedding, no change in their dialog, no change in where they live. Nothing. That unfinished part expands to a lot of the rest of the game as well. The town you build by the desert and the port you help build are more examples. The characters keep talking about how lively those places are, but they feels so empty each time I go through them. It's like a ghost town. There is a lot to like about this game. The laidback atmosphere is great and for once a lot of the potential spouses seem like adults instead of children. I'm excited to see what they do with Sandrock now that they have a much larger team. I just feel that Portia wasn't finished and they abandoned it.

In short, a masterpiece. This game is a fantastic remake of one of the greatest games of all time. Each colossi serves as not only a boss fight, but a puzzle that can kill you while you try to solve it. As wonderful as the graphics are, I honestly can't say if I prefer this more to the PS2 version. The original pushed the PS2 to its limits and made use of a harrowing, bleak atmosphere that honestly isn't present in the PS4 version. Oh, sure, the world is barren and void of life, but it feels more alive and rich than the bleak PS2 version. That's just me nitpicking though. The game itself is still a masterpiece and Bluepoint outdid themselves. It couldn't have been easy taking a game as beloved as this and remaking it.

This game series is great, though like Bethesda games, it's held back by weird bugs that their various systems have when interacting. Some times, I'd grapple onto a boat and I'd suddenly be going in a completely different direction. Half of my deaths in this game were from enemies spawning in helicopters right above my own and crashing right into me. Also like Bethesda games though, those bugs didn't keep me from really enjoying myself for the most part.

This game was much shorter than JC3, which I believe comes from removing the need to completely clear out bases before taking over territories. The island also feels smaller, but it's been years since I played JC3, so I can't really compare the island sizes.

The weather weapons are a lot of fun to play around with, though I usually found myself falling back on a few reliable weapons when things got dicey in combat.

The missions started to feel repetitive, and by the end, I just skipped everyone's side missions and focused on clearing out each territory so I could complete the game.

All-in-all, a good game.

Full disclosure: I played this on the Switch emulator with rewind function.

I really enjoyed this game. If I had played it back when the game had first come out, I think I would have loved it. That said, it is weird even for a Mario game. The unusual choice in enemy sprites and locations makes me believe that the game was either once intended to be a completely different game, or that they reused assets from another project to cut down on development costs and time.

That said, it was fun to play and I feel it holds up relatively well.