Final Fantasy II is a troubled game with a lot of potential buried under a mountain of problems. They tried a lot with FF2 but sadly most of it didn't work.

The levelling system is creative and I can see the vision of characters that can be grown however the player likes and grow as you use them in the direction you use them, but in practice it just encourages poor behaviour and playing like a maniac. Even the "fixes" offered by future releases like Pixel Remaster basically amount to the game cheating your skills, health and attributes up more quickly, freely and frequently to lessen the need to stand punching yourself in the face like a lunatic for hours on end.

The dungeon design too is a competitor for the worst in the entire Final Fantasy franchise, unrewarding mazes full of monster-closets that punish instead of rewarding you for looking around and taking the time to try to find all the loot and secrets the game has to offer. Once again the only fix PR could manage was to tone down the absurd encounter rates.

But despite all this there's still something in the game worth saving in it's story and general 'vibe'. While the story itself is simplistic and repetitive, and the characters too underdeveloped to form attachments all that strong with, the tone of Final Fantasy II is nonetheless incredible with a fantastic soundtrack even by the series standard and a somber mood throughout. Do you know any of the characters long enough or well enough to shed a tear when half the cast bites it? No, but the fact the game is brave enough to repeatedly kill party members and have them stay dead is something in itself, even if the repetition makes it lose weight it still has feeling behind it when people stay dead unlike something like Final Fantasy IV where the characters keep showing up alive again later on.

There's a feeling throughout FFPR that of the 8-bit and 16-bit FF games, there's more like three attempts each at two games between the odd class-based and even evil-empire-story-focused entries in the 2D series, but while Final Fantasy IV and VI are both better story-tellers and better games that Final Fantasy II I think FF2 nailed the mood the first time around in a way only the latter half of FF6 competes with.

Final Fantasy II is a lot of good ideas and things to love left underdeveloped in a generally pretty poor game. I can imagine a world where FF2 got the modern Squenix re-imagining treatment like FF7PR or Strange of Paradise and turning out something incredible, but I'm not entirely sure that the original is actually worth playing today.

Mass Effect 2 is incredible, a sci-fi adventure masterpiece that should sit alongside the likes of Star Wars as one of the genre greats.

There are some pitfalls here and there, such as concessions made to the RPG aspects of the game in favour of smoothing the clunkier gameplay of the original release of Mass Effect or a variety of content cut short or left unfinished due to either development time limits, console hardware limits (such as DVD size limits on the Xbox 360), or publisher backlash fears (such as Bioware cutting down on the freedom of available companion romance options), but even with all the wondering of what could have been put aside Mass Effect 2 is still a must-play for any fans of sci-fi or RPGs.

Mass Effect 3 feels like a frustrated writer spitting on the previous games in the series because he had to work on a sequel to someone else's work.

Mass Effect 2 is a darker game than Mass Effect 1, but both games are "Space Opera" adventures. Mass Effect 3 is not a Space Opera, it is a war story begrudgingly told in space. It's not impossible to do a genre pivot like that well, but Mass Effect 3 doesn't do that well. Mass Effect 3 feels like the (new for this game) writer's gritty unrelated war story wearing the skin of the Mass Effect series grotesquely stretched over it's face because it's not the project the writer actually wanted to be working on. Plot hooks and intrigue as to the true motives behind the Reapers and overarching narratives from past games are completely thrown out for derivative and uninspired motivations delivered by ridiculous deus ex machinas that weaken the past games and their stories by association and retrospective context. While there are some nice character moments with companions from the previous games if you import a save file, the game at time feels outright contemptuous of being part of an ongoing story and like any "happy outcomes" made possible or easier through past decisions are handed over with a scowl like the writer's hand is being forced. Shepard no longer feels like your character and simply the writer's pre-written protagonist, any pro or anti Alliance, Council or Cerberus sentiments you pushed in past games thrown of the window for the pre-assigned ideals and beliefs of the new writer's ideal player character.

The gameplay can't even save Mass Effect 3 if you enjoy playing the series on a higher difficulty. Sure, the gunplay and usable powers are some of the most fun they've been in the series, but the enemy and encounter design comparative to previous games is a tedious, unfun slog of drawn out encounters that take the weakest points of Mass Effect 2, the various arenas of wave survival into bullet-sponge bosses like on Horizon, and seem to base every other combat encounter on the same template.

The only things that come close to saving Mass Effect 3 are two truly incredible DLC in the forms of the Omega and Citadel DLCs, which are easily two of the highest points in the series, but even if you save them for last to end on a high note you're still going to have your spirits dampened by the infamously terrible ending that throws away three entire games worth of decision making for a choice between three pre-canned endings.

The multiplayer used to be fun for a laugh with friends, if not particularly deep or fleshed out, but it's been over a decade since the original version of ME3 released and LE3 removed the feature entirely so it's difficult to enjoy now.

Mass Effect 3 is overall an insult to the two games that came before it, only worth trudging through if you're commited to seeing your Shepard's story through to the end.

Mass Effect 2 is incredible, a sci-fi adventure masterpiece that should sit alongside the likes of Star Wars as one of the genre greats.

There are some pitfalls here and there, such as concessions made to the RPG aspects of the game in favour of smoothing the clunkier gameplay of the original release of Mass Effect or a variety of content cut short or left unfinished due to either development time limits, console hardware limits (such as DVD size limits on the Xbox 360), or publisher backlash fears (such as Bioware cutting down on the freedom of available companion romance options), but even with all the wondering of what could have been put aside Mass Effect 2 is still a must-play for any fans of sci-fi or RPGs.