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Favourite games are the 4 best I played this year
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This review contains spoilers
There are so many minigames and activities, and outside of a couple, they were all great. I especially liked the Johnny quest which made you collect trinkets from all over the world, some from mastering minigames, some from tough challenges, or some from random exploration. The flavour text on a lot of them was really nice too, and it acted as a nice sort of completion list. Another one of my favourite parts was the Protorelics and their overall quest. They are all references to 7/Remake, and I appreciated them bringing back Fort Condor since I thought Queen's Blood wasn't that great. Just like the previous game, the sequel is very easy, even with dynamic (just level scaling?) for most of the time, so I do wish they would just give a harder difficulty from the start...Also, like the remake, the last chapter here kind of gets a little too crazy, and I was equally confused as to how your party members get picked for each phase. It turns out to be set, and it looks like it will be a lot easier when I replay in hard mode. Despite that final chapter, the rest of the game seemed pretty faithful, hitting everything with only a few glaring changes (Gi storyline expanded, Cid introduced & handled differently, Tifa lifestream). The extra postgame challenges and hard mode in general (I assume from Remake) were a nice way to end the game and get rid of the memory of Grasslands (I hate that zone so much now). Though I understand it is much harder to justify for a lot of people with how large this game was (even if they give you more time playing as Sephiroth and Zack).
Did they tease Zack way too much? Yes, but I loved seeing Cissnei and hearing the music in Gongaga.
Could they have deleted grasslands since it is a terrible zone? Yeah, but the later open world zones are much better because you're forced to explore more with your chocobo.
Could they have cut or split another zone like Corel? Yeah probably, Corel being in two different locales at two different times in the story really helped with the pacing.
Could you cut 90% of the things Chadley says? Yes
It's still pretty early to give a proper opinion, but I really liked this. It's not perfect like I thought it would be with the demo since it seems to lean on a lot from Slay the Spire. The stakes (difficulty system) are really pretty harsh, and it seems very hard to ever come close to consistent wins there. Lots of runs will just die so early if you don't get anything to help you survive. I think doing the highest difficulty really did drain me from how helpless it feels. It also just feels like such an excessive grind for each deck to have its own stake progression. 15 different decks (a good number of them are really interesting though), each with 8 stakes, is kind of insane when I compare it to the two big games I've spent the most time on: Monster Train with 12 (2 dlc) different champions all sharing the same progression up to 25 covenant ranks, or Slay the Spire with 4 (1 new) characters and 20 ascension levels for each. Since these decks need you to unlock stake levels too, it made me feel like I should incentivize 1 deck rather than going for the variety like in MT (rotating every champion to 25).
The unlocks lean more on that too, with some strange out there requirements that pretty much force you to go look up each one if you truly want to get everything and set up your run in a specific way while hoping to get lucky. Not to mention, you can also sticker every joker at every stake level (insane). I ended up winning with every deck at various stakes and got a couple of decks up/at to max (lvl 8), but I didn't really go for insane scores. I can see just playing lower stakes and going for score/variety being a lot more fun. Anyway, this is only after about a week of playing, and I'll definitely get back into it in the future since there are other games I want to play. Maybe I'll go back and joker/voucher hunt the final ones. Maybe it was better to just get every joker before going to stakes. Maybe there will be some new stuff to see, and they will ease up on some of the other things.