I've been kinda itching to play this for almost 7 months and i'm really happy this is a game really makes me happy with all the characters of this franchise, it feels like a culmination of the previous games and giving an perfect conclusion for the first half.

The concept behind Fate, future predictions and bonds were all delivered well into this. The idea of routes into the game is fantastic which ones has their peaks without having an pacing issue in it and has stuff happening in their respective routes.

Everything being converged at the end was pretty much the PEAK of kiseki for me, build-up, climax, soundtrack, everything went crazy in it.

Episodes giving an bit an characterzation to each of them were dope as hell but Osborne episode is gonna live rent free in my head so much.

In conclusion this game managed to give enough seratonin while making me sad that ''i'm caught up'' to the series (i'm waiting for the pc port :copium:) but i'm really happy that i was able to experience this game and i love it with all my heart. GOD I LOVE TRAILS

RUFUS ALBAREA...

I KNEEL.

tl;dr
I write this review with tears in my eyes, I finished it not even 5 minutes ago. This game concludes the entire first half of the entire franchise's story. Hajimari no Kiseki: the beginning of the end.

I replayed the entire franchise to play this game, yes, I played all the games again.

I've some issues with the game that I doubt you'll agree with everything I'm going to say, but it's my opinion in the end. First I'll start with the positives: Rufus Albarea, I kneel; C route was by far the best route in the entire game, and not only that, but also C team is the best team in the entire franchise, the most dynamic. Beware of that, best team for what a TEAM really is. In Sora no Kiseki, Estelle and Joshua shine, they're for me the best couple in the series and the best duo I've ever met, but a team for what Kiseki is would be a group of 4 people, Sora no Kiseki's cast is the best in the franchise for me, but as a team, bro, Nadia and Swin are amazing, and Lapis matches perfectly with C, it was an extraterrestrial dynamic, genius, I genuinely enjoyed it a lot. I like the SSS, but I prefer C team. I liked this team so much that I would play on it for the entire game, but unfortunately... the fact that I've to play with Lloyd's team and Rean. Rean's route was the worst of all, honestly I thought it was pretty mid, Lloyd's was good, but C route was a true masterpiece, man, I would score 10 for this game if it was only C route. And Rufus, bro, this is not a spoiler review, but the man is a legend for me now.

The beginning of the game was AMAZING, middle game was kinda bad, but the finale was AWESOME. Besides the fact group C carried the game, man, Rean's development in the final was fantastic. The whole game kind of informs you that one cycle has really ended and now another one is starting. Nadia and Swin have absurd potential. I really liked them both, btw.

Honestly, halfway through the game I was wondering why the fanbase likes this game so much, I found it a little overhyped, but after playing everything I understand a little. I still think it's a game below many others in the series, but I still think it was very well done. Almost ideal for almost everything the franchise has presented so far.

Btw, title screen OST is one of the best in the franchise as well, but the OST in overall isn't the best one.

For last, C Team................... you guys............ chad.

Also, postgame really pissed me off, it would be insanely better if it was before the ending.

Very well, friends... now all we have left is 2 and a half years... but we'll overcome what awaits us... SEE YOU IN CALVARD!!!!! MEGAMI NO KAGO WO!

what's up yupz I know you're reading this bro send me a message in my discord Ouji#0729 tmj irmao

Uhhhh I think this is kind of a masterpiece? Beating it with save-states felt like an immense triumph. Satanically fast, uncompromising shmup -- an abstract art piece of a game. Feels truly alien and hostile, with music that is somehow badass and frightening at the same time, visuals that leave you queasy and uncertain and disoriented, and bosses that will tear you apart the second you encounter them... that is, unless you are lucky enough to duck a pattern or two and plant a bomb right up in their fucking grill.

This isn't everyone's cup of tea, to be sure, but if you like pain, and if you like games that feel like they're the weird labor-of-love of a single, depraved mind, then check this out. Hail Yagawa.

Man this game just did everything right.

it managed to bring amazing closure to the Crossbell and Cold Steel arcs while simultaneously having its own amazing story that manages to make its 3 already amazing protagonists and a ton of members of its cast so much better.

The 3 routes are all amazing (even if C and Rean have slower starts than Lloyd) but its just an amazing experience from the magnificent prologue all the way up to the Finale which just surpasses everything else the series did before it

Only real issue i have with the game is the postgame TRC but it lead to the amazing true final boss and gave episodes which were absolutely brilliant so its fully fine

Genuine love letter to Trails as a whole

i'm trying to think of when exactly i heel-turned on the pokemon series... i cut my teeth on third and fourth gen, returning back in time for gamefreak's arrival onto the 3ds with x and y, and the cracks certainly showed then, but nothing could have been more damning than the release of omega ruby/alpha sapphire, its absence of the beloved frontier explained away in an interview citing "well, who the hell finishes these games anyway?" and that sort of blew my mind, hearing a game director outright handwave inattention to the delivery of their own product with "oh, who cares?"

inattention... is certainly one word that comes to mind when playing pokemon legends arceus. the entire game feels cobbled together from breath of the wild's sloppy seconds, some mmo styled fetch quests and tasks, and youtube videos of pikachu running through an unreal engine wheat field, comments repeating one another with "THIS is the game eight year old me dreamed of playing!"

well, dream bigger.

here's the gameplay: you, the player, enter a map from rust with unloaded textures. in this ugly mess of morrowind bump mapping, you run around and collect resources. of the many things you can make with them, a pokeball is one, and that is how you'll build your team. once you've lobbed enough of the things at unsuspecting wildlife (or suspecting because you ran full steam ahead and threw the damn things like mad), your new goal is to train the team and fill out the pokedex... in addition to completing story beats, of course.

but let's talk pokedex. capture a 'mon and move on, right? wrong. capture 5 of that mon. kill 7. see it use 'ember' four times, and so forth. you do this for every single pokemon, these series of menial tasks designed to give players SOMETHING to keep them in their far cry 2 usermaps long enough so that they don't run through the game too quick. and you have to do this, by the way--the pokedex acts as gym badges do in the mainlines, each badge ("rank") allowing you to use higher leveled pokemon. don't give a shit about screwing around with budews and geodudes? well you better, and you better do it often lest you lose control of your own pokemon.

how about the battles? it's funny--i feel like the initial trailers made combat seem more involved than it really is, which is... your standard turn based affair, really. there's some reworked 'speed' stuff going on, but it's genuinely whatever you're used to from the mainlines with the strange addition of being able to walk around and harass the poor beast you're fighting (or, rarely, its trainer). it's fine, too--don't mess with what works. it's actually fantastic how smooth the transition is in and out of battle, too, a player in legends being able to cut through five starly in the same amount of time a bdsp player might take with just one. this begs a question, though: why no multiplayer? huh? it's the same battle system as anything else, so what's the excuse? why can't i go fight my friends with the shiny zubat i nabbed? gamefreak can't handle seeing me run around in an arena crouching really fast in front of the opponent?

let's get back to the map, again, where all these battles take place. there's not much going on in them. the moment you exit the city hub's gates and find yourself with newfound freedom (after an hour of excruciating tutorial), you see.... virtually nothing of interest. there are some poorly rendered trees out in front, and some... rocks to the left. some grass. there's mountains in the distance, but don't be deceived--this isn't an open world game. you aren't climbing that mountain. you're certainly welcome to piddle about around them, though, the only 'reward' for exploration ever being just finding large pokemon every so often (at turkey leg dangling higher levels, too). for all the ideas nipped from botw, creating intrigue in landscape design isn't one of them. it's just your very, very painfully average set of bump maps with repeating water textures, repeating dirt textures, repeating rock textures--

it's an ugly fucking game, is what i'm trying to get at.

"graphics don't matter!" graphics matter. they aren't the end all be all, but a book in light grey print on pages sopped with coffee certainly presents a more unenjoyable reading session than you'd like. it's questionable why the game is in this state at all, barely steps past the original alpha trailers. this is the part where i must iterate and reiterate: pokemon is THE most profitable media property in the world, eclipsing genuinely anything you or i can think of. gamefreak and the pokemon company bring in over 170 million dollars annually--so where the fuck has it all gone?

well, i can make a guess: straight into exec's pockets. these games hardly matter when the pokemon company's biggest source of income stems from merchandise of all things, so here's the position pokemon legends found itself in at gamefreak: the studio wanted to make a nintendo-hire-this-man type game, they were told "sure, and you'll do it in two years!" to which someone probably complained, asking why so little time, how they'd have to dramatically cut down the scope and intent, to which they were probably told "so?" among "it'll sell regardless" and maybe even "no one finishes these damn things anyway."

and that's where gamefreak found themselves, having to create a scope actually manageable. it has its good little bits that the team knew they needed to get right, like going in and out of pokemon battles, qol changes making managing a team easier than ever (choose when they level? choose their names after? hell yeah), and even the brief interest of just hearing a faint, familiar pokemon cry quite near you... but it all takes place in these ugly, lifeless worlds sorely lacking trainers, sorely lacking cities and towns and settlements at all, sorely lacking actual level design and creativity and care.

so maybe it isn't inattention. in all honesty, gamefreak probably did the best they could given the time they had and the ideas they wanted to work with, and they knew the shit that was bad... was bad. the end result is a barely fun gameplay loop with tried and true designs smothered in mediocrity, in fetch quests and genshin tasks, in a lack of art style and cohesion, in sandboxes that fail to justify themselves, in a story that i wanted to spend a paragraph writing about but what the fuck ever, it's a pokemon story, that shit was always going to be bad.

let me wrap this review up by describing the (spoiler free) circumstances leading up to deciding i'd had enough. i did my fair bit of exploring and leveling up, and it got very old very quick, so i plowed ahead with the story and ended up at a boss fight with baby's first dark souls mechanics on display--one i ended without even using a pokemon. this granted me access to a new area, and it was there that i found the same ugly level design but with 50% more brown. i hightailed it to a ruin (which was a large, square, empty box) and met a character who hated my guts. i found three bandits after a hyped up cutscene all to just face one level 23 pokemon, and then i returned to the ruin character who now suddenly loved me as a result, her character arc completed in the span of 5 minutes, and i then realized that if i wasn't playing any longer for the exploration, and i wasn't playing for the gameplay, and now i didn't even care enough to play for the story... then there just wasn't any reason to play a minute more.

gamefreak could've done better--even if you end up playing and loving legends, you may still find yourself agreeing with that sentiment. but they won't do better, and they won't have to when these games sell the incredible gangbusters amounts that they do. the pokemon company knows this, and that's why gamefreak's never going to get the dev time they actually desperately need. so long as half baked $60 early access crap like this is peddled out and sold in the millions, nothing will ever change. in other words...

should you buy pokemon legends, you aren't supporting a brave new direction to take the series. you're supporting a grindhouse dev studio forced into mediocrity, and that's the direction they've gone for the past decade, and it'll be the same till they or this series dies. just don't forget an arceus plushie on your way out.

I couldn't get very far with this game before getting absolutely fatigued with it but I think it utterly fails at capturing the aspect of ff7 I really like the most.

Other than the fact that the original is one of the most earnestly introspective games, had commentaries on nearly every archetype presented in the game, is chock full of content and plot with perfect pace, and manages to utterly demasculate and break down the shounen jrpg hero figure, the original final fantasy VII bucked the tone of the action hero fantasy by both playing up the heroism and swashbuckling with a thick, palpable layer of melancholic and innocent irony.

Irony is often something cynical, something too adult or hardened. A way of coping with the world. But the irony in ff7 was pure, a kind of return to the true nature of what people are. It's not judgmental, it doesn't have expectations, and it's not cynical or bitter. It's simply a sense of peace, with life, oneself, loss, defeat, heroics, struggle, hardship, passion, all the products of friction between a human being and the world around them.

The remake simply lacks that tonally. For the best possible example I can think, watch the moment in the original game near the beginning after the first bombing mission, where every exit of the screen Cloud tries to exit through, he gets cut off by troops and the player is presented with the choice of running or fighting at each turn. It's a straight swashbuckling scene, the hero is cornered at every turn and the choices are weighed against him over and over, and like some of those great heroic stories and films, the hero's not really in any danger; we've seen cloud oneshot those goons earlier with ease, it's purely an aesthetic situation. Yet, the music is utterly at conflict with the scene. It's somber, it's innocent, it's complicated, and very, very subtle. There's something amiss. The scene begs the player to expect a deconstruction, a demasculation, and the undoing of what people know and expect from the game without overtly stating it. It acts as the prelude for the game later changing its own writing and having the player reevaluate what it stands for.

I don't care about nomura ghosts, action combat, new scenes, or any other changes as long as the game gets that one aspect right. That one tone that only the original ever had. I couldn't detect it, so I gave up. I could be wrong, and maybe find that core spirit somewhere else in the game if I come back to it. Or maybe the remake just plain goes for something else, and maybe that's worth it in the end. Still, I feel something's missing.

Also a few other notes, the sidequests Suck ass. Going from ff14 ARR to 7r felt like I was moonlighting one job for an even shittier one. Not recommended!

All else said, that combat system is like the complete evolution of what kingdom hearts started on the ps2. I'm happy it's gotten this far. Mechanically this game plays like everything I wanted when I was 12.

Final fantasy has always been a game about putting all your ideas and the sum total of everything you have to say about a theme and design into one game. Every game in the series is both the first and final game in its own franchise. Those designs and ideas could have anything, any kinds of gameplay systems or plot ideas as long as it grandly tells a story with roleplaying and mechanics. I welcome the real time combat, as it's the series trying to understand and remix what else is out there and put its own spin on things by creating a newly aestheticized experience of combat. Final fantasy 20 might have no combat it in at all. Be ready for it!

“Really sorry about your ass.”

(some spoilers for OG FF7’s first ten hours, no spoilers for FF7R)

I started this review series by listing my absolute favorite games; both because being positive feels good, but also to provide a kind of baseline for what to expect here, I suppose. In that same vein, I feel it’s also important to show contrast: if my favorites are all about pure mechanical expression and smooth, organic interactions, then FF7R, conversely, represents everything that holds games back to me. This thing is so rigid and limited that it somehow manages to feel more outdated than the turn-based 90s RPG it’s remaking. While FF7’s original design-ethos was built on detailed one-off environments, contextual storytelling and intuitive yet flexible battle mechanics, FF7R completely tears down all of these pillars, leaving in their place the kind of nightmare-hyperbole-parody that weebs are describing when they talk about the latest Call of Duty or Uncharted.

Action-adjacent Square RPGs like Dissidia or Crisis Core can have this tendency to not ground your actions in the game world very much — it’s the difference between button presses triggering canned interactions between actors, or throwing out an actual hitbox that I need to connect with the enemy. FF7R feels like the final form of this in the worst possible way: for as gnarly as the impact of Cloud’s flashy sword combos on enemy grunts may look on the surface, there isn’t actually any real physicality to how your attacks throw them around, nor does the addition of square-mashing add anything meaningful mechanically when compared to FF7. You quickly realize that your standard attacks don’t actually do appreciable damage and solely exist to pad out the time between ATB moves, a process that previously moved along on its own. No amount of alibi-action disguises the fact that this is, at its heart, still a turn-based RPG, where enemies weak to fire need to be hit with the fire spell and damage can’t be reliably avoided. You get about five hundred different ways to “parry” attacks, none of which actually require any careful timing on your end, but interact with enemies in ways that are completely arbitrary. The final boss in particular is a hilarious display of just how bad this game wants to look like a Devil May Cry, while still working under NES JRPG rules and refusing to adopt things like consistent telegraphing or hit reactions. In those instances, it’s some of the most shallow and repetitive action-gameplay imaginable.

Countless FF7R skill videos do show how much this new combat system can pop off, since it gives you control over when and how to queue up party attacks and provides some unique states for active positioning on the battlefield. What those videos all have in common though is that they're exclusively shot in the game’s VR challenge missions with precise Materia setups; ideal conditions for the system to shine that flat-out don’t exist in the rest of the game. Campaign mob fights run the gamut from boring to soul-crushingly tedious (those goddamn sewer fish guys,) while any fun you could be having with bosses is knee-capped by absurd damage gating and forced cutscene transitions that will eat any excess damage you put out that moment. This aspect should’ve been a top priority with the boss design considering how much combat revolves around slowly building up this Stagger bar, where the majority of the fight is spent purely setting up the boss for when you can finally lay the smack down (which, just like for FFXIII, already does a lot to make individual actions feel linear and meaningless.) The way all that damage will regularly evaporate into nothing due to factors completely outside your control feels like having a bag of Tetsuya Nomura-shaped bricks dropped right on your nutsack just as you’re about to cum.

Under that light, the proposition of digging into the Materia system and trying to get the most out of it is absolutely laughable. I can’t even begin to tell you how many boss fights I went into only to realize halfway through (after some kind of form-change or mechanical switch-up) that my setup wasn’t optimal, forcing me to either slog and fumble through the rest of the battle, or back out and start from scratch with this new knowledge. All that’s on top of the godforsaken menus you’re forced to work with that hit this abominable sweetspot between clunky stone-age level interface design and the suffocating swathe of meaningless skill trees you’ve come to expect from modern AAA games. How is it possible that healing outside of battle literally takes longer in this game than it did in Final Fantasy (just Final Fantasy. 1. the first one.) on the NES?

FF7R’s final Shinra HQ invasion has to be one of the worst isolated parts of any game I’ve ever played and represents a microcosm for how little it respects your time. Every issue I’ve discussed so far is amplified now that your party is split in half, with no way to quickly transfer setups between the two teams. Fights are now sandwiched between “””platforming””” sections that have Tifa monkey bar-ing by transitioning from one excruciatingly slow canned animation into the next. To get back to what I was saying in that second paragraph: for as much as Uncharted’s climbing for example is brain-dead easy, it at least provides some vague sense that I’m in control of a character in a physical setting, instead of giving commands to a robot on the fucking moon. The least you could say about Uncharted, also, is that it gives you shit to look at. What is the point of remaking the most popular JRPG of all time as this PS4 mega-game when that entails turning all of its handcrafted backgrounds into featureless copy-paste tunnels and compressed-to-shit JPEG skyboxes, all of which now necessitate what feels like hours upon hours of squeeze-through loading?

All that begs the question: what exactly did I push through this trash heap for in the end? I categorically reject the notion that a game this mechanically regressive can still come together purely as a vehicle for cutscenes or something, but even entertaining that idea for a minute has me confused over what the big deal is. My impression is that FF7R managing, against all expectations, to not be some Advent Children-level train wreck sapping any and all life out of these characters, is enough for it to come across as this masterful reexamination of the original story to many players (also that the whole cast is hot.) The reality is that, while some of the dialogue and character interactions does hit, this game is 40 hours long and naturally a lot of that extra time is padded out by your party members giving each other directions to hopefully not get lost in this FFXIII-ass level design. It’s pure filler and adds little of value to the existing story.

FF7R’s most crucial mistake, and why I’ve now realized this remake-series was an awful idea to begin with, is to think that just knowing wider information about a character will automatically make us care about them more. I first played the original in 2015, and back then, the deaths of Biggs, Wedge and Jessie legitimately shocked me. And it’s not because I was particularly attached to those characters — instead, it was all in the execution: sudden, unceremonious, unfair and way too soon. That’s the whole reason it worked, and it was a way to make you hate the faceless corporation that was Shinra that actually felt earned. FF7R not only tries to endear us to Avalanche by giving us exponentially more time with them, it bone-headedly draws out their deaths in a way that’s so corny and obvious it borders on parody. You’d think giving the villains more screen-time would be a harmless at-worst change, but presenting them as these hot badasses only makes this feel even more like some generic Shounen anime and less like the systemic fight against capitalism that was the original.

I’d be lying if I said the way they contextualize this remake within FF7’s overall story wasn’t kind of clever, but my gut tells me this twist is only gonna feel more lame as time passes. It’s already at the point where it derails any and all discussion about the game; where somehow being a little bit meta means all the shit about it that makes me want to off myself is actually intentional and smart. The literal first numero uno side-quest I did in FF7R involved crawling into some back-alley, killing a pack of rats, going back to the quest giver to be told I “didn’t kill the right rats,” heading to the same spot again and finally killing the new rats that just spawned there. The starting area this quest takes place in has to be one of the ugliest sections I’ve seen in any AAA game, with hazy washed out lighting and NPC animation that hasn’t evolved a bit from FFX on the PS2.

The most poignant experience I had in my time playing FF7R was in Wall Market. It's easily the most gassed-up part of the game online, mostly to do with the fact that it’s a vehicle for wacky anime cutscene shenanigans and how the characters ramp up the horny to the max of what a Square Enix game is comfortable with (that Don Corneo confrontation is cringeworthy with all the awkward pauses between lines.) In Wall Market, you can enter this bar. The barkeeper will ask you to sit down and have a drink. You can’t do either of those things; you just stand there as the NPCs around you gaze into the void.

FF7R is not the fully-realized mega budget dream version of Midgar we've all been salivating at the thought of, and it’s not some clever meta commentary either. No, I’m pretty sure it just sucks.

I could go on about the gameplay loop, but one hidden gem about this game is the meta-interaction between Rance and the player; the oft-memed picture of whether to assault the miko girl or look at her panties is typical AliceSoft dark humor but perfectly captures how the game forces you into Rance's mindset for worse. Anytime the player tries to play to their own sensibilities or morality they're severely punished for it; not having enough sex lowers Rance's battle performance, making some story battles overtly difficult, and trying to play peacefully or mercifully will have the player miss out on several strong benefits needed to beat the late-game factions. By forcing the player into roleplaying Rance, AliceSoft lets the moral dilemma of the Rance series shine through: how can this supreme asshole be the hero of the story?

Nominally, Rance is really only the hero because everyone else in the Ranceverse is a total piece of shit, including the character literally designated to be the "Hero" of the verse, but more deeply, Rance finds his success entirely by being a undefined, hedonistic shithead in a world where everyone else is simply following the pre-determined roles assigned to them. Rance does what Rance wants to get by; the Player does what they can to get by. The finale of Brutal King Rance was a revolution of the created against the creators, a final No Gods No Masters message from AliceSoft; it's only fitting that the spiritual successor to Brutal King Rance would also re-assert that the player themselves is not the master of Rance either. It's a refreshing take on a JRPG protagonist, and provides a lot of food for thought, especially in contrast to AliceSoft's Toushin Toshi II, where the player is explicitly punished for having a moral center anywhere near Rance. I'm not sure I'm fully onboard with using sexual violence as the emotional hook for a lot of the on-paper narrative here, nor the occasional homophobia, but if you can look past that there's a compelling exploration of existential freedom and amorality that's unlike anything else in the media.

Also the design work is incredibly creative and varied, minecraft-esque characters sitting comfortably next to Masamune Date as an eyeball. It slaps.