This was... really not good.

A short form review for a short form experience, with a runtime of maybe four or five hours at best, Final Fantasy XVI's final DLC is a complete departure from what made the main title so good. Ultimately (heh) the issue with Rising Tide is that it's both not interesting and infuriating. The new locale Clive and the gang find themselves in is isolated much like the Echoes of the Fallen DLC. There's not much to do in the realm of exploring, and what you can poke around and interact with wasn't worth the price tag. The village and its populous are kinda just there with no real varied culture or intrigue to make me wish to interact with them further, and the setting chugs the Playstation 5 somehow to Bloodborne levels of framerate. The unfortunate thing for XVI here is that it is not Bloodborne and won't get a pass. I don't know, if I'm engaging with a civilization and its dominant unbeknownst to the greater world and largely lost to time, I'd like them to stand out just a little bit past their appearance?

The combat in Rising Tide frustrated me at similar levels as EotF did just before it, in that you're playing through a dungeon with raised difficulty levels (Which is okay!) however you're throttled by an inability to return to Outer Heaven and restock at any point. Now when you game over you can refresh potions... but this felt like a pretty annoying workaround. Bosses, namely the ultimate one, are genuine sponges taking a frustrating amount of time to defeat even if you're well equipped and geared for the task at hand. This was an issue I had with Rebirth and it rears its ugly head again here in the last bit of XVI we'll get. If I'm doing stagger damage of over two million... you'd hope to get a sense of vindication in healthbar removal moreso than you'll get in Rising Tide. Poorly tuned DPS checks, overwhelming mechanics that lack visual clarity, an enemy that is constantly flying away from you all in addition to the aforementioned sponge issue make for a resoundingly aggrivating experience.

For someone who was a massive fan of the main game in FFXVI and even had it as their Game of the Year for 2023, Rising Tide unfortunately tarnishes the legacy of an otherwise stellar title. It doesn't add much to the excellently crafted personas of Clive, Joshua, or Jill, as you get little in the way of conversation or captivating quotables, instead thrusting the player into a lukewarm time. I do not recommend Final Fantasy XVI: The Rising Tide.

Not Funny: Didn't Laugh

I can hardly muster up the strength to review Immortals: Fenyx Rising. It's such an affront to every thing I deem "positive" within the history of gaming and the industry at large that it's honestly hard to narrow down in an honest and complete writeup. It's more Ubisoft garbage, meant in with full connotation of what such terminology in 2024 could possibly bring. Want your towers? You got it! Want your frivolous objectives to complete? You got it! Want your battle pass thrusted into your eyes at every conceivable moment (including completion of the game?) You got it!!!!!!!!! Hey and to chase that all down, we'll even include a faux mouse on the menu screen for controller instead of letting d pad select what you want... because why not!

Genuinely little to nothing about this game was good except for the fact that it was easy on the eyes? The terrain looked pretty swell, and the game ran crisply at high settings throughout... but man the world was lifeless and filled with nothing to interact with. I get that it's effectively the story driven playfield of Prometheus and Zeus as they telll the tale of your titular "hero," but the world felt pointless to explore. For a game that is as shamelessly a Breath of the Wild knockoff as Immortals, you'd think they'd have understood that part of what makes Zelda special (especially BotW) is that the world that is out there is teeming with life and fresh experiences to be had. You can find new villages with new NPC's that are sure to give you dialogue with sharp wit or humor along a hopefully interesting task. This title has none of that, it has vaults for you to complete... challenges for you to painstakingly comb through. Because why become inventive with your copycat title when you can simply become lazy?

I spoke briefly about the narration from the legendary titans in Zeus and Prometheus, and I'll warn the reader that this remains a constant throughout the entire game. From minute one to the end, these two narrate your every move and try their hardest to be "funny" the whole time. I won't try to argue that I know the complete definition of "humor," but the constant attempts at creating jokes and funny hee hee ha ha's wore thin as soon as it could. Again, the beauty of BotW and TotK lies within how many moments are spoken by the player's mind. The journey Link shapes as he explores Hyrule and takes in the sights and sounds of a boundless expanse lie ultimately in origin to the person guiding it. Immortals throws this all in the garbage, drives it to the incinerator, and turns the flames to their hottest temperature. No moment can be truly taken in by the player and enjoyed as is with the two speakers accompanying every single step.

I can't with good confidence recommend anyone play Immortals Fenyx Rising. This game isn't fun, it isn't funny, and it was surely a waste of the time and $6 spent on it.

Starved Ocean

Star Ocean is a franchise that remained largely out of my view for most of my life as I didn't make the crossover to JRPG's formally until I played FFX after it hit the Switch in 2018 or so. As a result, many famed series' borne from the Golden Age 90's flew under my radar and I didn't have a chance to experience them until fairly recently. Over time I've tried to dabble into many of these in an attempt to understand gaming history and get a taste of the genre as it grew. I didn't "play" my first Star Ocean until the Divine Force demo release on PS5, immediately confused by the plethora of mechanics going on and monotonous combat I dropped it. I'd only gotten into it because of name recognition, knowing that Star Ocean was one of the "big" Square/Enix titles from the SNES/PS1 era, but dropped it because I figured it wasn't going to be up my alley. I didn't want to remove Star Ocean from my lexicon though, because I'd known that a unanimously "good one" had to exist out there somewhere, and with The Second Story getting the remake treatment... I figured it was time.

Upon launch of Second Story R, I immediately fell in love with the science fiction setting and incredible HD-2D visuals. As a big fan of the graphical direction of the Octopath/Triangle Strategy team, Star Ocean's graphical sheen was an immediate reward to my eyes. I paused every few moments of meeting characters, running through villages, and existing within the world to take screenshots and send friends images from my playthrough. Enamored I was by the world and the plot leaving your imagination of what could happen next to a pilot landing in an unfamiliar world. That's kinda where the praise stops unfortunately, as the curtain fell pretty quickly after that into my Second Story R playthrough... along with my rating.

The bad wasn't necessarily as grating as a lot of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's bad was for me (which I reviewed recently,) it was just confusingly grating. To start is the seemingly random difficulty spikes and settings of Star Ocean: The Second Story R. I played on the "normal" difficulty equivalent for a majority of the game and it felt, fairly hard. I figured with some time dedicated to grinding that I could make the experience easier for myself and breeze through what I considered to be the "tougher" dungeons at the time. I found out after about two hours of grinding and gaining some thirty plus levels that there was no different "feel" in my strength levels. Enemies could still one shot you and perma stun your party with remarkable ease, your characters didn't feel like they did any better damage per hit, and the game didn't actually get any easier. Now this changed a bit later on as I grinded north of level 100 and gained new abilities for my secondary party members because they gained access to new spells that seemed to disrupt more and do more damage, but they got one shot just the same. All the way from world enemies to dungeon encounters to the final suite of bosses, I found myself furiously mashing resurrect items and healing spells to get through encounters that felt like they should have been a breeze with how much I grinded. I spent hours effectively AFK just listening to my own music while I ran around in circles soaking free exp, and nothing actually felt easier. I tuned up my stats across the board, which mediated issues I had with the difficulty, but I was still dying with 9999 hp from petrifications and paralysis' all the same.

This brings up another issue I had with Star Ocean... information and skill overload. I joke a lot about how Persona 5 effectively tutorializes the player for the first like, fifty hours of gameplay, but hey nothing feels confusing or rushed at that point in the game. Within the first few hours of Second Story R, the entire skill tree and IC/Speciality suite is opened up to the player to understand and dive through. It's more than just levelling up your attack, magic, and defense. It opens up the Pickpocketing, Crafting, Music, Writing, Alchemy, Cooking, list goes on trees that the player is supposed to fully understand. From what I knew with my experiences with these tertiary skills is that they accented the player and made it easier for me to level and be strong... but outside of training and scouting I had absolutely no idea. I couldn't tell how worth my time it was to construct books to level attack or perform songs to summon certain enemies because the tradeoffs were completely unclear and the materials necessary to do so were obfuscated or gated behind currency. This resulted in my levelling up train (sacrificing damage for exp gain) and scouting (populating more enemies on the world map) so I could stand still and let my characters go to town on consistently spawning enemies. I'm not sure if this was the best way to go about it, but I didn't want to have to study Star Ocean tactics for longer than I did to understand it. Grinding is pretty much never fun in games, especially in older JRPG's where the heal/save options aren't as desirable as they probably could be, but Star Ocean's levelling systems felt like watching paint dry, but the paint occasionally personified to get up and slap you in the face before going back to the fence it was being applied to.

Combat was bad, voice acting even worse, and the plot was lukewarm at best. Star Ocean: The Second Story R was an ultimately milquetoast experience that I'm not really even glad I got to play. It lands and bombards the player with lots of great visual fidelity (and the cutscene work/character portaits are rather impressive throughout) but lacks the sticking power to create a compelling experience worthy of note. I cannot recommend Star Ocean: The Second Story R to anybody except maybe fans of the old Action JRPG genre.