Having now beat it twice, I feel pretty conflicted on this game. The combat and bosses can be really awesome when they get a chance to shine. The music has clear inspirations but is beautiful all the same. However, most of the story has no heart, the writing is terrible, the side missions are almost exclusively mid, and the art direction has no cohesion.
The only thing more stale than most of this game is the conversation surrounding it. But when the game has as hype as a final few hours as it does, its hard to not be excited for a possible sequel

"Even a fly lives for a day"

Final Fantasy IX is a very strange game. A decades-long reputation and countless Final Fantasy ranking lists made it impossible to go into this without expectations; knowing it's so widely regarded as one of or even the best entry in the series is hard to ignore, but I tried my best to stay reasonable, and even expected not to like it as much as 7, and to compare the two as little as possible as I played.
This worked out pretty well in the end, but unfortunately my thoughts on this game in isolation ended up being even more confusing as a result..

If you sit on the title screen for a moment, you'll see images of the party members, each with a title and a thought related to their personality. Virtue: You don't need a reason to help people. Sorrow: How do you prove that you exist? May we don't... Devotion: Someday I will be queen, but I will always be myself. Solitude: I don't want to be alone anymore. -- These honestly make for a great first impression, and had me going in with even higher hopes that the characters would be fleshed out with rich and well written arcs surrounding their unique perspectives. I don't want to go on too long or trample anyone's love for the title, but I'm so disappointed that this ended up being untrue.
To be clear, a handful of characters do get some proper development and go through real growth. Zidane, Garnet, and especially Vivi, all succeed in this regard in my opinion, and make for some of the most interesting elements of the entire game. Steiner and Eiko definitely get their growth as well, but in a much more 'secondary' feeling way, with less ongoing presence, and this is even worse with Freya and Amarant, who seem to have their whole stories told in just a few specific moments with very little going on outside of those. (And then Quina honestly might as well not even be there I'm sorry. Their menu screen says "Indulgence: I do what I want" or something but what it should've said was "I like food, that's my whole character" 😅)

Anyway, due to this, the game fell a little short for me on the party front, and all the times I'd heard that the characters are so well written became a confusion as to how, when less than half of them even have a story to begin with. Freya's arc in particular is very powerful, and the concept is excellent, but as with a lot of the game's moments, it happens and then it's over, if that makes sense? There's no lasting impression, like being told an emotional story and then immediately putting a movie on. Idk this may just be me but I felt like a lot of scenes would've benefitted from being allowed to breath a bit more and giving me time with a soft song to let it sink in. Sure I could've just stopped playing and sat there, but that's not how I play :p

I've rambled a lot already so to quickfire some other thoughts I have: The combat in this game felt really bad, I'm sorry. Like all of it, I played on PS so I had the cheats to instantly trance and do 9999 damage, but even by the late game when I had good equipment and high levels the fights either felt unfair or just took way too long. The delay between every attack and whatever slows things to a crawl I never ever would've gotten through it playing normally. By the final area I still didn't have a single summon available on either summoner so idk what the deal was there, and after maxing out my levels and abilities to have a full party of Lvl 99's, Zidane's base attack was doing 4000+ damage and my summons were doing less than 1000.. why game 😅 This is probably me being stupid and not understanding something, but yeah not for me, big dislike. And phoenix down's reviving you with less than 0.5% of your hp is comically useless idk how you're supposed to do anything with that!

Narratively, the story took a hot second showing it's face but once it got going and especially in the endgame I ended up liking it. I can understand why the core principles and themes of the game resonate with people so strongly, I just think the execution of a lot of the arcs and the gameplay itself take away from it a lot more than I would expect for a game with a reputation so strong that when I started it the only common issue I knew people took with it was the battle intro being too long 😅

Ultimately, I definitely like this game, I dare even say that it's a good one, very good maybe. It's just a shame that the good is buried underneath so much that felt undercooked to me. Lots of really great ideas all thrown into a pot that's too small to fit them - some of it may be cooked to perfection, but you've gotta eat through a load of under or overcooked food to get to it, and that sucks.

People have been pretty vocal that this game should get a proper remake in the way that FF7 has been, with some even saying it should've gotten one instead of 7. I used to think this was just because they prefer 9, and the 7 v 9 rivalry will never end, but even as someone who prefers basically everything about FF7, I think I kinda get it. Neither game is perfect, of course not, but in terms of which game has the potential to be greater than it was if given proper time, care and a much improved execution? Maybe.. I believe that the best possible version of FF9 could improve upon its original more than the best possible FF7 could.

This ended up running a lot longer than planned so I'll cut myself off here -- hope you're all keeping busy with your backlogs in what's turning out to be a somewhat quiet year for the industry. I've not been reviewing/rambling as much recently because it takes me so long to type 20,000 words per game, but next on the docket is the latter 2/3rds of TWEWY and then honestly I might jump right back into Final Fantasy with my first proper playthrough of XIII, the controversy will continue :p
Thanks for reading everyone, hope you're well! 🙏

This game exceeded even my highest expectations in almost every way.

I could talk about it for hours but as with Remake I don't think it's possible for me to do it justice, it's peak. I've spent over 200 hours with FF7 Rebirth now and I could easily jump back in for a 3rd playthrough today.

This game is such an achievement, and home to some of the most beautiful scenes, characters and music in memory. If the final part is able to do even half as many things as well as this does, then we're in for a phenomenal trilogy of games.

As an aside, getting the platinum for this was insanely fun and surprisingly easy ... until the last few combat simulations. It took me around 40 hours over 5 days to get them done. I am begging that part 3 is easier 🥹
Thanks for reading folks, hope you're all doing well!🙏

Alone in the Dark is the next remake in a long row of remakes that we got over the last few years. But is any good? Yea I mostly enjoyed my my time with the game but a huge disclaimer at the beginning, this "remake" is rarely a remake of the original and more a reimagination because there isn't much left of the original game. Simply there isn’t much left of the original mansion. I just recently played the original game for the first time and I was shocked when I noticed how different this game is. There are many new characters and locations and now you might say that this is a good thing but they also cut a lot of the old rooms of the mansion. So much that I didn't recognize it and I finish the original just 12 days ago. But maybe I'm just suffering from amnesia. What I liked about the game was the cast, it was cool to see David Harbor and Jodie Comer as the main characters. I'm also happy that almost every note is voice acted even with different voices which is great. This contributes to the dense atmosphere and the lore of this game was pretty interesting, you can't say that about the story. It's also more puzzle oriented than survival horror, there are only 4 weapons with no upgrades and the meele attacks also only consist of spamming R1. The game in general is very clunky, I frequently got stuck on objects in the environment and the combat feels clunky too and the hit feedback is bad. There are also only very few types of enemies and one of them are these "facehuggers" things. Fighting them was annonying as hell. They completely ignore bullets and they are the only enemy that has a QTE and you go from QTE to you recover from QTE to camera glitch so you can't see to QTE again until you are dead. Most of the cabinets that you can search loot either don't open very wide so you can't see what's inside and they were empty 90 % of the time anyway which made exploring feel very unsatisfying. The game also only has 2 boss fights, one was very easy and the other one very annyoing. The ending felt rushed and was kinda underwhelming. But the pacing after chapter 3 was overall not the best and it needed more polish. After finishing the game twice, once as Emily and once as Edward I can say that there are a few different dialogues with the side characters and some level segments are slightly different but nothing too major. All in all the main story is still the same. There are also different endings which can be unlocked after collecting various collectables but sadly all of them besides the main ending are glitched and can't be obtained.
Overall I still enjoyed Alone in the Dark, especially due to the great atmosphere and the focus on puzzle rather than action. I also liked the lovecraftian vibe that the lore gave me. You should probably play it on the easiest difficulty because the fights aren't the reason why you should play this game. Emily's story was also more consistent and I would recommend you play her on your first playthrough. Alone in the Dark's focus on puzzles and story instead of action/fights was a nice change but you can notice pretty quickly that this game didn't have the biggest budget.

Games I finished in 2024 ranked

Balan Wonderworld, if it was
• made competently
• for the girlies
• had unique levels

It is VERY short

Can gamers at least try to be consistent when trashing games for having MTX, it feels like such random games always catch heat for it when there's much bigger offenders even among Capcom's own library (Monster Hunter World & Rise lmao)

I can at least understand people being upset over optimization (even if in my experience I've had little to no issue in the 5 hours I've played so far), but obviously the issue differs from person to person.

Game is fun tho, I'm having a blast, this really is just an improved version of the original Dragon's Dogma and I'm all for it.

Went into a cave that seemed to go on forever, in the pitch black feeling my way around. While trying not to aggro saurians I went in a room that opened up in a suspicious way, so I stuck to the edge wall to go around just in case. My pawn, however, didn't get the memo: at some point a saurian had caught sight of someone in my party so they were in full attack mode, running straight into the middle of the room. about 5 seconds later I see a huge blue light silhouetting a goats head and a massive health bar appears. I have never run out of a room so fast.

why do vanillaware titles always cause so much melties LMAOOOOOOO, notice how none of the review bombers have actually talked about the gameplay.

anyways, this shit is really good (so far - only 11hrs in), so if you're on the fence about picking up a cool srpg - i'd strongly say go for this.

also i carnally need berengaria so bad