Like Octopath Traveller, it’s a game I can tell isn’t bad, but I personally just found it a completely tedious chore to play, not helped by my save data being lost a couple times, sending me back hours more than once. Unlike Octopath though, I was much more invested in the story and characters, enough so to actually see this one through to the end. A very strong story about coping with loss and the cycle of death and rebirth, backed up by a colourful cast and and an even more colourful villain. Made the whole experience worth it.

Narratively, this was a treat to experience for the first time over covid. Few pieces of media can keep me guessing through to the end the way this game did. It lets you know early on that it’s willing to nosedive from its lighthearted tone directly into some truly shocking, depressing places, completely change the scope of the narrative without warning, and that nothing is off the table when it comes to its world ending stakes. The characters as well are so diverse, memorable, developed and have a familial band dynamic comparable to that of The Last Airbender. The game is constant surprise after surprise and it never lets up until the credits roll. Gameplay-wise it’s great as well. Turn based games usually have to work a bit harder to win me over, but then again, this game isn’t really turn based. The active time battle system and all the different ways you can mess around with materia and summons gives you tons of freedom to customize to your whim, think outside the box and break the game in creative ways. Oh did I mention the OST? Top 3 of all time, and it ain’t #3. I whistle some of these tracks to myself at work all the time.

I do have a couple gripes. I played the Playstation Classic version, which is based on the original release, which was littered with translation errors which especially made the game’s midsection a bit tough to follow. It’s also a very minigamey game, and I found them inconsistent in quality. I’m really glad the Playstation Classic had it’s own save scumming feature because without it, grinding the Gold Saucer for the Omni Slash most definitely would’ve seen a hole punched in my TV. And for as much as it subverts a lot of my least favourite JRPG tropes, it still features some of them in full force, like random encounters.

It’s flawed, but it’s high points hit high and there’s a good reason why Square has milked this game like few others in their catalogue.

I kept hearing that this was some sort of secret Elder Scrolls-killer, a cult classic, “Oblivion on steroids” it even says on the back of the box. And I gotta say in all honesty: No it is not.

The graphics and animations look worse than a lot of PS2 games. Seriously, some of this shit looks like it belongs in GTA 3. Yet despite that it runs at a framerate of about 20 most of the time and still constantly freezes and stutters, rendering the game almost unplayable. Combat sucks. Attacking is incredibly imprecise, the attack animations are floaty and stilted, you look like a kid playing with a toy lightsaber, and whatever you’re using, swords, spears, clubs, your attacks have dismal range, which is especially infuriating when you’re trying to chase down something that keeps running away from you like an archer. When either you or your enemies get hit, you jitter awkwardly in place and there’s a low res blood effect that looks like it’s from an early version of After Effects, and bafflingly, the sound when you hit enemies, again with anything, swords, clubs, whatever, is a stock cartoon punch sound effect, like something out of a Nostalgia Critic video, as if it was a placeholder sound that they just forgot to replace before the final release. There’s also a backstep with stupid long i-frames that’s easy to abuse and isn’t even animated, just has you rubber band backward. The enemy AI can also be really stupid, and they’ll sometimes just sit there throwing attacks while you’re out of range. Under normal circumstances, I found most enemies were fodder, I found myself getting screwed over by the janky mechanics a lot of the time, but when things lined up (aka, I abuse the backstep), regular enemies could be dispatched by the dozens with ease. But then it’ll hit you with these really abrupt difficulty spikes and suddenly throw you up against enemies far higher a level than you that can kill you in two or even just one hit. The game also theoretically has an open ended main quest structure, but the level and reputation requirements for each area roughly constrict you to doing them in a certain order unless you plan on grinding insubordinately. There are debuffs too, which I think are supposed to immobilize you, based on the animation, but you’re still able to move through them so it’s you sliding around in the animation of you standing there, covering your eyes or something. Quest design is basic at best and repetitive at worst. Most quests are just you talking to a guy, then he sends you to talk to another guy, who sends you to another, then another, then another, and it just keeps repeating ad lapidum, until it culminates in you being sent to fetch or kill something. The whole experience is also buggy as hell. Animation glitches, audio glitches, several moments had me or my horse getting stuck on nothing and having to reload a save.

To top it all off, the writing is awful. On the surface the story is basic, find the mcguffins, save your oddly sexualized sister. In practice, it mostly just boils down to exposition, you being told things that you’re almost never explicitly shown. And it feels like every character is drunk, as characters make some of the dumbest, most baffling and counter intuitive decisions I’ve seen in a game like this. The dialogue isn’t much better. It sounds like they wanted to make it old timey, but couldn’t be bothered to do the research, so they just threw words like “pray” and “verily” into sentences at random. The delivery makes it worse, this voice acting is some of the most horrendous I’ve ever heard, I have to mention a particular npc in the Japanese part of the map, who cycles between like three different accents in the same conversation. Then again, you’re probably not even going to hear all of it though, because the volume is hugely inconsistent, I had frequent cases of the music drowning out the characters voices.

This game is a complete disaster. But I hate to end on a completely negative note, so if there’s one positive I can think of off the top of my head, I found it amusing that bandits had a pocket sand attack.

A short while ago I read that article about Naughty Dog and how they literally suppress use of the word “fun” within the studio. I think it paints a picture of a company so up its own ass, so out of touch with the medium they’re working in, and I think it stands in stark contrast to a game like Tekken, which is so unabashedly a video game above all else. It’s combat is refined and technical, yet accessible enough that a new player can jump in and jazz up combos on the spot. It’s got a full roster with all my favourites from Tekken 3 back. It’s full of customization options, side modes like the arcade mode, Devil Within (which isn’t as good as Tekken 3’s Tekken Force, but it’s still a fun little bonus) and it even comes with the first three Tekken games. It’s so full of content, creativity and fun-loving character, and I love it.












It was also neat of them to give the final boss a move that straight up just wins him the round, fucking Jinpachi with your fuckass stun and your fireball.

I got our old PS2 working again, so I decided to pick a couple titles up from a retro games store near me. The guy at the counter told me this was one of his favourite games and said he was excited to know what I thought of it. That’s probably going to be an awkward conversation.

The good first, it’s a damn incredible looking game for its time. It honestly looks better graphically than some early PS3 games, and it’s running at 60 frames a second? Damn the PS2 was a good ass system. The general feel of hitting things is good, and the ragdoll physics are pretty funny. Kicking dudes into groups of other dudes like bowling pins was always fun, and watching your character do a cartwheel and flop around when he dies always made me laugh and softened the blow a bit. Other than that though, this game isn’t very good. Movement is sluggish, made worse by an automatic lock-on that means you can never really control what you’re aiming at. The timings for attacks and combos are very weird and unreliable. You basically have to throw the whole combo before the first hit even lands, so you can’t cancel out of it if it doesn’t connect. But on top of that, this is one of only a handful of games to use the dualshock’s pressure sensitive buttons for some combos and attacks, and I’m not talking some complex Tekken-style inputs here, I mean basic attack combos. They’re hard to pull off correctly at such a fast pace, so fighting is really awkward with you just finnicking around, trying to get the correct inputs and throwing out wrong moves left and right. All of this I found led to a lot of cheap deaths where I’m finnicking around trying to get combos to connect properly, and I just get screwed over because of it. It was especially bad during the boss fights. In addition to that, the game has a leveling system where you get points to spend on your stats, except you only get points for enemies you land the final blow on, so you have cases of your AI partners stealing your kills on you and you not having enough points to keep up with the escalating difficulty curve. A particularly frustrating incident was when I was fighting the first boss Echidna (who, by the way, straight up uses Eddy Gordo animations), and after dying to her again and again and again, I get her health down, about to land the final hit and….Volt kills her. There goes my big bonus.

This isn’t a particularly good game, but if nothing else, between the hilarious ragdoll physics and that incomprehensible, out of left field Nomura writing, I was laughing for much of the time. And it’s short. Even with all the trial and error and frustration, I beat the campaign with Sion in like a night.

I feel a bit guilty still giving this game a rating this high. I’ve become really disillusioned to Bethesda in recent years, and this game still has huge, at times game ruining issues that they still just have not bothered to fix across any of its remasters and rereleases. I don’t care how good the water looks, I just want to be able to complete the fucking Bloodline quest damn it. And yet I can’t deny how this game still manages to suck me in. It’s so massive in scope, so dense with things to see and do, so many choices and customization options available to you, and with an atmosphere that just takes me back to a different age. It takes me back not just to that era of gaming, but also to that era of internet culture, all the animations and machinimas from people like Freddiew and Psychicpebbles. The fandom and excitement this game garnered was real and it was hard not to get sucked into.

Now THIS is the Devil May Cry I’ve heard so much about. Fast paced and full of style, energy and character. The combat sandbox is fluid, satisfying and allows for a fair bit of improvisation. I do think the style system is a bit rigid, I would’ve loved to combo the Trickster’s aerial warp with the Swordmaster’s aerial combos, but even as is the system has a lot of depth, and each style offers something for every playstyle. Against that is a diverse assortment of creative enemies that get more and more challenging as you progress, and not through just reskins with health and damage turned up, they’ll actually behave in more challenging ways, they’ll flank you, they’ll rebound and counter attack, etc. Dante himself is such a goofy, shit-talking, pizza loving frat boy, someone who loves to show off, perfect for a game about kicking everything’s ass in the most stylish way possible. Vergil as well is a great contrast, cold, self serious, he and Dante play off each other well. The story itself isn’t some masterpiece, but it is well structured and implemented in the context of the game, with Vergil, getting strong enough to beat him, hanging there as your ultimate goal through everything.

As great as this game is, I did still have a couple flaws with it. A couple of missions I found really obtuse, #15 in particular I had to look up a guide for after running around like a headless chicken for a half hour. The camera, while a vast improvement on 1 and especially 2 solely for the fact that you can actually adjust it this time, did still sometimes dick me over, sometimes it was in too tight and I couldn’t see all the enemies around me, sometimes it would drift into an awkward spot in the middle of the action, when I couldn’t focus on adjusting it back. I also thought some of the bosses were a touch weaker than others, Arkham was an especially underwhelming runner up to the true final boss.

As a whole, this game was great. I can easily see how it set the standard for this type of game and in many ways still does. I’m looking forward to playing DMC4 and 5 somewhere down the line.

I was curious about this one. I knew it was reviled but it wasn’t immediately apparent to me why just looking at footage of it. So Instead of looking up reviews I decided to go into it blind and uh…now it’s apparent to me. The look, the soundtrack and the general controls are fine, worse than the original, but fine. Pretty much everything else about this game is dogshit.

Enemies fall into one of two categories, either a big dopey punching bag who sits there and lets you wail on them, or a flying enemy who hangs out just offscreen or just outside your range. There are some enemies that I don’t even think I saw attack once, the mobs in this game pose almost no threat to you. Combos aren’t a thing anymore, mashing triangle is all you can do with the sword, not that you should be using it at all though because the guns are completely overpowered, just hold down the fire button and watch as your enemies are helplessly juggled to death. I had cases where I just stood there spamming the guns and ended up clearing the room without even moving an inch, and mind you, there were minibosses among them and they were just as helpless as all the other fodder grunts. The game has a bullshit auto lock on that always seems to rip you away from things right in front of you. The camera is somehow vastly worse than the original, the few hits enemies get off on you will probably be because the camera was zoned in on some empty corner of the level while your enemies wound up an attack offscreen that you couldn’t see coming. The bosses are where everything wrong with this game all seems to culminate. They’re all either just as worthless as the regular enemies, or they’re infuriatingly cheap. I gotta give special dishonourable mention to Trismagia, who has this thing where only one of its heads is vulnerable at a time, but it’s not immediately apparent which it is until you actually start shooting and damaging it, and there’s no way to manually change auto lock targets, so you spend most of the fight either finicking around trying to find and lock on to the right head then get your damage in, all the while dodging its attacks, before it disappears and you have to start the whole dipshit process again. The story is practically nonexistent, what little is here is completely dry and incoherent, things happen at random with no context or reasoning, and the characters are all planks of wood. There aren't even any credits when its over, after the final boss you're just dumped back to the main menu. If there’s one slight silver lining to all of this, it’s that it’s mercifully short, it ended right as I was considering abandoning.

This whole package is baffling in a way that you have to experience yourself in order to truly grasp. If nothing else, this was an educational experience. Devil May Cry 3 is up next, I’m hopeful it will serve as a good palate cleanser.

Man, there's something about the Capcom games of this era. The early Monster Hunters, Resident Evil 4, and now Devil May Cry, they have an ambience that just feels like home to me.

Revolutionary when it came out, and honestly it hasn’t aged the worst. Combat still holds up fairly well, and while simple compared to character action games even just a couple years down the line, there wouldn't be character action games down the line if not for this. It does come with drawbacks however. You can definitely tell this was a repurposed Resident Evil game. The slower pace, the lock and key style progression, the annoying fixed camera angles, not to mention the game has a very economical feel to it with a lot of reused enemies and boss encounters. The platforming segments as well really annoyed me, demanding precision of you that the game isn’t reliably capable of. And lastly I found there was some pretty wild variance in how long and how difficult some missions were compared to others. Some only ask something trivial of you, like “leave this room,” then you’ll have others like “find this mcguffin, carry it all the way across the map, figure out this obtuse puzzle, navigate this horseshit invisible platforming course, then beat this boss who has a move that sends you to fight a whole ass other boss among those you’ve already faced EVERY single time it hits you, and if you use up all your lives you gotta do the whole thing all over again. Good luck dick face.”

Hiccups aside though, there’s a very solid foundation here and it definitely raises my expectations of what’s to come.

In a lot of ways it reminds me why I was so lukewarm on AC3. The story missions are filler-y and repetitive (I lost count of the number of times I had to tail someone back to the same exact ship just to climb the same exact mast and perform the same exact assassination from above), the story is whatever, the melee combat is very basic, it looks flashy but all you have to do is spam the counter button to win, with the occasional someone making you hit the break defense button first instead (or that one piece of shit boss you have to hang back and shoot like 20 times), and there were lots of rough edges with the ragdolls often going crazy, animations not always lining up and a couple missions that had me spawning in clipped under the ship. Redeeming it though is how much it leans into what’s probably my favourite thing about these games, immersing in the historical setting. Sailing the high seas, getting into ship battles, singing sea shanties, navigating storms, exploring the tropics, diving for treasure, this game really lives up the pirate fantasy, gives you lots to do and I love it. I do really wish though that you could keep more weapons on your belt than just the dual swords. Muskets, hatchets, boarding axes, or even just single swords, you could keep all of them in AC3, so I don’t know why they decided to slap an arbitrary limit on you here. Aside from that though, my experience was positive. I think this might be my favourite Assassin’s Creed game.

This game is kind of middling. Far more linear and repetitive, enemy types are less, the writing is weaker, and I think a lot of the levels look very drab and unfinished. I mean just compare the Metropolis level in this to the Metropolis in the first game. It’s fine, it’s still adequately fun, but it’s a big step down from what came before and on it’s own I’d give it something like a 6/10. What semi-redeems it though is the multiplayer, which was one of my favourite couch games growing up. Yes, the reason for it existing is kind of sleazy and it’s probably the reason the rest of the game is lacking polish, but I still had tons of fun playing it split-screen with my friends growing up. The mix of real players and ai grunts on either team made these matches feel like proper battles. I’m telling you, more multiplayer games should go the PvPvE route.

One of those games that encapsulates the creative, fun-loving spirit of the PS2 era for me. It’s full of little touches that give it so much personality and character, the title screen with the quiet ambience of Ratchet working away in his garage, the CRT filtered menus, the expressive animations, even subtle ones that most wouldn’t catch, and that excellent score which always sets the right mood, but also knows when to back off and let things on screen play out. Every creative decision in this game feeds into the next, it has some of the best theming of any game with everything tying in one way or another into the satire of consumerism and artificial pop culture, almost like a PG Robocop. The gameplay creates this unique blend of shooting and playforming. Despite the aiming being kind of awkward, I actually like the lack of a strafe run in this one because it forces you to think a bit more carefully on what weapon to use in each circumstance, and the weapons are very creative and diverse with each fitting a certain situation. It definitely has it’s moments of datedness and jank (as in most of the minigames) but I think most of what’s here still holds up pretty well.

Good, but a couple things keep me from calling it great. The fact that enemies come at you from all 360 degrees but you can only attack left or right, how sprawling the maps are compared to how sparse the loot is, how the teleporter is more annoying to find, how sometimes you get lost in all the visual noise. I loved Risk of Rain 2 for letting you go wild, break the game with all the different synergies and tricks. This feels comparatively more restrained, adheres more to the classic roguelike formula. Not that this is necessarily a detriment in its own right, I still think it’s decently fun for what it is.

The only other Far Cry I’ve played is Blood Dragon, which I think is a perfectly average game, elevated by its character, that look and feel thoroughly reminiscent of an 80s styled neon sci-fi action movie. Now imagine that game, zero advancements made to it mechanically (if anything it’s regressed a tad, with floatier shooting, and far stupider AI), trade that macho 80s vibe and character for something far more generic, now imagine it with these tacked on RPG elements, so enemies, and more frustratingly animals, are spongier and the whole thing is arbitrarily grindier. But also there’s a premium currency shop, so you have the option to pay real money to get all the best shit right away and skip the grind. You also have the option to pay nothing and skip the whole thing. I’m gonna recommend you go with that option.

I can’t think of another game, besides maybe the original Metal Gear Solid, that I was so obsessed with growing up despite never owning it. I remember those incredible trailers, those Neil Blomkamp shorts, the Believe ads, hands down the greatest marketing campaign for any entertainment product ever, nothing comes close. I remember all the machinimas for it online, Go Halo Go, Red vs Blue. And I remember desperately coping with the fact that I couldn’t play it by telling people, and myself, that Uncharted is better, Resistance is better. But they weren’t better. They were fine, they were good, but they weren’t THIS. Halo is once in a lifetime and we’re very likely never going to see anything like it again.

I’ve played pieces of the multiplayer and forge mode at friends’ places over the years, but it’s only now that my brother has a refurbished Xbox 360 that I finally have a chance to play through this game’s campaign myself. And it’s easily one of the greatest shooter campaigns I’ve ever played. It’s epic in scale, open ended, full of unique weapons, enemies, vehicles, varied areas, incredible art direction and it has maybe the comfiest gamefeel of any fps. What I love most about it though is how freeform it all is. The levels are wide open and you decide what weapons, what vehicles to use, what routes to take, how to get over the hurdles the game throws your way. While it has lots of incredible scripted moments, most of this game’s moments happen organically. I was honestly a bit mindblown when I realized the massive Scarabs were organic entities within the level, not just stuck to a railroad like they would be in almost any other game. The AI is also easily the best I’ve ever experienced in a shooter. Enemies will act in character, push up, try to flank you, some will panic and retreat when you take out their leader, others will make a desperate final bull rush when they’re low on health. Allies will push the objective, scavenge enemy weapons when they’re low on ammo, hijack vehicles, and hell I can’t think of another game where I’ve felt so comfortable in the gunner seat with an AI driver. Then there’s the story. It has the resonance of something like the original Star Wars trilogy, in that you take it seriously when you need to, you’re interested in all parties and buy the dire stakes, but there’s always a certain fun loving pulp to everything. Fun loving is how I’d describe everything in this game. It’s so unpretentious across the board and never loses sight of the fact that it’s a video game above all else.

Every part of this game I’ve touched is so lovingly crafted and carefully thought out. It’s everything I want in a shooter, a true AAA masterpiece if ever there was one. I only wish I could’ve been there to be part of the community and the hype while it was in its prime.