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.

Slaps the roof of the Persona Franchise

"Ah yeah, this can fit so much peak in it."

Because I played Portable not all that long ago, I won't speak in as much detail as I usually do about new titles. My P3P review can be found here, what I do have to add is below:

Persona 3 Reload rectified an incredible amount of issues I had with P3P, a game which I played last year as it hit PC for the first time, jumping my Persona 3 experience from a 2.5 star to a 4.5 star rating. What did the Persona Team do in this recreation of a fan favorite? Viewable character models!!! Though that is a tremendous boon to my enjoyment of this title, it was just the tip of the "wow this is pretty damn good" iceberg that is Reload. Improvements made to the OST, design, and combat all turned this experience from a simple rehashing of a game I found decent at best to my smash hit of 2024.

"Persona Vibes" have been a joke in my friendgroup for some time... that silly stupid smile you get from simply existing in the Persona world going to school at whatever institution MC-Kun attends with the whatever group of misalined teammates that you call your friends with some of the best soundtracking to grace the medium of videogames... but damnit if it isn't really a thing and doesn't hit as hard as it does. The jump from Portable to Reload for me was a massive reward in this regard, just being able to run around Tatsumi Port Island with a high-definition display and consistently present hip-hop music creates an amazing vibe you can only get from Atlus' marquee franchise. I felt a noticable lack of buy-in to the world and characters at hand in Portable when I was mousing over and clicking on still profiles, it means so much more being able to physically approach and interact with the richly variable (yet still not deep) cast in terms of creating immersion. While I still don't find myself as into the cast of P3, nor the location (since its so small in comparison to P4 and P5,) it's still Persona at its roots. Maybe if I'd played FES or the original release, my approach to P3R would be a little more tempered, however I can't stress enough how nice it was to actually experience the world. I didn't forsee this being as much of a difference maker in my enjoyment of P3 (because I still have my issues with the game) as it was, but it did rectify the absence of Persona DNA and feel that existed in Portable.

As I've touched on a couple of times now, Lotus Juice and company did a fantastic job modernizing the work they and Shoji Meguro did in Persona 3's original OST. The instrumentation and mixing sounds far superior than in the original P3 suite, with the modern renditions of songs like Changing Seasons and the Dorm Theme (oh my gosh, they really did fix the dorm theme from the horrendous HEY HEY HEY version) as examples. It's more crisp, goes along with the redone and colorful locale, and lends itself to a more seamless Persona-experience. What I had originally imagined would be just a simple re-use of the already pretty strong P3 OST ended up as my front runner for Soundtrack of the Year. Normally I wouldn't count remaster/remakes/ports in this category but the lifting job in Reload to take an already great work of music into the stratosphere is as commendable as you can get.

I applaud the improvements made to integrating your party more into seeming like actual members of your crew through linked episodes which feed directly into the combat boons that are Theurgy's. Having a sort of ultimate attack/limit break in Persona is much needed for some of the longer weakness-lacking boss encounters, which are a plenty in P3R. You fight a lot of rather tough and long winded enemies in this game and it's nice to have a way to blast through that a little quicker while still having to retain a sound strategy and mind.

The negatives that existed within my P3P review that still remain in P3R include: horrible social link optics in many arcana's (Maiko, Maya, Kenji to name a few) which unfortunately were not re-written/fixed, abysmally slow pacing in the early sections of the game, and tartarus being the worst in-game mandatory dungeon in gaming (that I've experienced.) While these negatives still remain, the good in P3R was pretty damn good and enough to offset any and almost all sour feelings I had with my experience in P3P.

While it's not flawless, Persona 3 Reload rectifies Persona 3's biggest issues and breathes elysian life into a game that had the ingredients for a fantastic dish. I'd recommend Persona 3 Reload to fans of Persona and JRPG's alike, it's one of the best experiences I've had in a GOOD WHILE in games and has left a Persona sized hole in my heart once again. I mean with no announcement for Persona 6 what do I even do? Are there otherr games out there?

"Don't say stuff like that, it's depressing"
- Sora Kingdom-Hearts (2013)

Two weeks after the day I began the game, I have finally finished Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, my most anticipated game of 2024. What I imagined would be my surefire GOTY runaway pick, with Final Fantasy VII Remake being a game I beat three times, ended up being something I couldn't even smile at in completion. The ramifications of a changing games industry on Square Enix have been plentiful, with a large creative downfall since Final Fantasy XII hit the late-stage PS2 in 2006, the series has had a handful of ups and a plethora of downs. For every Final Fantasy XVI or VII Remake, there were three FFXIII's and a Crisis Core in tow. Quantity beseeched lack of quality, and the legendary fervor the series had invoked for decades previous had largely escaped. With the aforementioned XVI and VII Remake, it seemed like Square had finally righted the ship, creating action-rpg experiences with their familiar franchise that were quality in both narrative and mechanical scope... so what happened with Rebirth? I will divulge below.

I'll start with the good, and to give credit to the Rebirth team there is quite a bit of positives about this title in its entirety. The most immediate and obvious boon to Rebirth and the legendary world of Final Fantasy VII is... the world itself. Shortly after the completion of chapter one the game opens up to a faux open world (in reality, this is open zone) that beckons Cloud and the rest of Avalanche's splinter cell to roam across it. Throughout the fourteen chapters of the game the world and environment are thrown at the player to ooh and ahh at, beautiful beyond words especially in contrast to the 1997 title. Historical moments from twenty seven years ago are brought into HD in a manner that not even I could imagine, with my mouth agape at so many of the backdrops and cities recreated within Rebirth. Familiar places (of which I shall not divulge in respect to spoilers) blew me away. For a game that was developed effectively in four years, it is almost impossible to believe how hard the team led by Naoki Hamaguchi must have worked to not only create, but faithfully bring back to life, a world that was rich back then into the modern gamescape. As I motioned throughout Cloud's journey and came across familiar sites, my brain superimposed the 1997 titles' pre-rendered backgrounds and polygonal Cloud in front of me. There's a significantly delicate line that had to be walked across to be faithful to what was originally imagined and entered into the annals of media history by Yoshinori Kitase while also putting together an engrossing and interactive world for the zeitgeist of pop culture, and yet they found success. Colors pop, the world is filled to the brim with flora, fauna and perfected asset-placement to make it feel lived in. Each biome/locale is visibly different from the rest, granting a linear benchmark for players to cite where the memorable moments of their journey lie and how far they've come... it's impressive and one of the better done worlds that I've experienced in recent memory.

Character writing remains another highlight that carried over from Remake, with some of the original titles' most heart-gripping and serious moments taking place in Rebirth. The nice thing about having a thirty plus hour experience and the events that took place after Cloud joined the squad in Midgar is that the party is very familiar with one another. Barrett takes a more mature role, often playing the voice of reason to Cloud's ever-growing disillusionment. Aerith and Tifa become best buds gushing over the blonde bombshell's buster sword skills, while also careful of his Sephiroth-borne fragility. Red becomes a trusted confidant, friend, and much more than the lab-rat you find him as in the tail-end of Remake. Couple these in with new crew additions like Yuffie, Vincent, Cid, and Cait and you've got a colorful crew (mostly) ready to save the day. They all play off each other well too, keeping the focus on the effectively apocalyptic nature of the world they're in but not allowing the fear and anxiety to overwhelm them, often quipping with one another on their route with jokes and aimed gags. The lightheartedness of the in between moments in Rebirth gave this game legs that are very hard to convey without voice acting and simply as text upon a screen. Aerith, Red, Cloud, and even asinine characters like Cait are legitimately funny throughout this title. My only real gripe about the character writing is that Yuffie, a completely optional character in the Original FFVII talks WAY too much about Materia and how EVERYTHING has to be excused for her involvement because it could result in a cool-hip new materia for Wutai. That got old real quick, but thankfully tapered off in the game's final few chapters. There were a few moments where the tear ducts wanted to rev up, all moments that originated in 1997 but didn't come to emotional fruition until 2024. Moments like these drive home how special this remake series is, not only to FFVII itself but also for the history of gaming at large. The ability the Rebirth team has to bring these special scenes to life is going to do a lot for people who have grown up knowing Cloud and the gang for as long as they've been around.

Per usual I won't speak on the greater narrative at hand, but I do strongly believe it does a great job in not just remaining faithful to the original vision developed by Kitase, but expounding on the landmark moments as well. As I touched on in the previous paragraph, the VA work and modified writing a great job on their own, but the longform dedicated cutscenery is the right hook to the emotional network of Rebirth. You can tell this game was expensive to develop for a lot of reasons, but for the sake of this point its most evident in the advanced effort put into the CGI. I was yet again pausing ad nauseum taking screencaps of characters faces, beautiful backdrops, summons, cool moves, and epic fights. Because everything looks so damn good, it makes the moments that were so narratively impressive in the first title even more so in Rebirth. Character deaths, story arcs (Red's and Barrett's in particular) are tear-jerk extravaganza's because of the visual sheen that everything has.

Other miscellaneous congratulations to this game are in order for having an actual enjoyable card game (the first since Triple Triad in FFVIII) in Queen's Blood, and for also having one of the best introductory chapters in any title that I’ve ever played. To echo the former, I didn't realize how cavernous the minigame content would get within Rebirth, but Queen's Blood kept going, and it felt better and generally more fun with the more cards I got. I found myself restarting matches less and thinking more creatively against advanced opponents, it was cool!

Unfortunately that is where the good within Final Fantasy VII Rebirth generally stops for me, in the Final Fantasy VII of it all. The moments they re-created and breathed new life into were f** awesome, but what the team added and engulfed the title into was largely fluff work that waned my enjoyment of Rebirth greatly.

There's a real power in having a concise game, in a linear narrative or a controlled game that beckons the player to complete it in a structured manner. Now if you've read my reviews thus far this may seem like it combats my affinity for player agency, but it really doesn't. The best games are once that allow players to meld their playstyle to a journey that doesn't waste their time or ask them to embark upon completion of side content that exists without point. My favorite Final Fantasy titles are FFX, FFXVI, and FFVII Remake... some of the more "linear" titles that the series has to offer (XIII was not good, I choose to forget about it.) These three games push the player through loss, intense conflict, entire character arcs, and changed worlds without forcing the player into sidequest hell. This is where Rebirth falters so greatly that I could hardly believe what I was dealing with, even so much to think I was being pranked early into chapter two of fourteen. I rolled my eyes so hard that they almost fell out of their socket when nobody's favorite AI Chadley mentioned the "TOWERS" that Cloud would have to find across each region to map out the other sidequest chains. You go to a tower, of which there were probably six to eight for each of the game's major regions, and these towers would shine light on the location of special fights, lore spots that decreased the power of the area's summon, protorelic locations that involve a major sidequest line with a secret boss, and scavenging hunt locations. All of these suck by the way, none of them were enjoyable.

The Ubisoft-ification of the industry at large plagues open world titles, forgoing the legitimate interest these massive lived out zones can have in favor of map markers that are nothing more than things to complete. You backtrack, climb, hide, slide, and glide all over Final Fantasy VII Rebirth just to tick a checkmark and get on with your marry way. Where XVI and VII Remake succeed is that the only side content that involved, are sidequests of which there aren't really that many. People had a qualm with the volume of XVI's side quests, but Rebirth's feels as if it were tripled, especially with the length that these have. It was fun to become engrossed with the populous of these new locales and fulfill their requests as you do in Remake, however the vast majority of these end with you fighting some big bad monster at the end to right all of their wrongs. This got old REAL quick, as you enter a new area ready to become engrossed in the legendary narrative and beautiful world just to be met with a litany of orange "GO HERE FOR TOWERS" and green "MONOTONOUS SIDEQUEST" notices with a full on checklist to work through as soon as you arrive. My major qualm here is that there's a legitimate power into letting players breath and become involved in the world that has been meticulously laid before them. When I get to [insert location] I want to be wowed by the overwhelming forest and beautiful greens and blues that bring it to life. I want to meet the characters that will guide Cloud along his journey and the troubles that are soon to follow before I'm beckoned to engage with recycled mechanical content that feels more like a chore than a game. I wouldn't've had as much of an issue with this if it was lower in volume or didn't persist for as long as it did... but for ten of the games first twelve chapters (2-11,) I was doing a thousand yard stare as I powered through tower after tower and fought fiend after fiend to quell whatever concern villager after villager had. I became tired, and that's something that let me down more than anything else with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

And while I'm complaining about the Ubisoft plague on Square Enix' household, can we talk about those Moogles? like... what is this? Why is this? Who is this? Remember that one story of the Composer for the Resident Evil Dualshock edition who gave us the butt trumpets because he convinced everyone at Capcom that he was deaf, but he actually wasn't and had absolutely no idea how to compose video game music? Do we have a certain situation with the design of the moogle here? Moogles by the way were another genuinely awful minigame mechanic within Rebirth, forcing you to round up five or so moogles into a round pen while they throw a cacophony of mysterious attacks at you. Cloud does this inside of a moogle chief's mushroom house while nightmare fueling music plays. The hero of a resoundingly serious narrative in which the fate of the world as we know it and the entire population within is on the line, is running in circles pushing these Lovecraftian creatures together so he can buy some... books? It sucks and it isn't even the worst of the side content that you as the player are asked to complete because it holds rewards that make you and your party stronger.

The other is the completion of the protorelic questline, rewarding you with the ability to transmute top of the line gear and a summon that is stronger than most of the ones you'll receive. None of these protorelic questlines are fun, and there's one again for each major region that Cloud finds himself in. Four times the player in these areas will be asked to engage with a certain minigame to get closer to retrieving a protorelic. In the first area this is Queen's Blood which is... doable. In the second it's Fort Condor, raise your hand if you had ANY fun playing Fort Condor in the 1997 title or in the Intermission content for Remake. See? I don't even need to know who you are, what you look like, or where you are to know that ZERO people in the world are raising their hand. With Fort Condussy in mind, another region asks Cloud to learn how to play Battle Bots to obtain this gear... for what reason? Couldn't tell you! Is it thematically relevant to the narrative or world at hand? No! Is it fun at all? No! Does it make you, the player, feel like you've used your time accordingly? Absolutely not! But hey, there's useful gear hidden behind this questline so you better do it! The worst offender doesn't materialize until the last chapter of the game in which you are asked to play "Cactuar Crush" with a goblin named Kid G. Do yourself a favor right now, if you don't care about a minor sidequest spoiler, and look at what Kid G from Rebirth looks like. You'll want to wish you never read that sentence. Cactuar Crush is a minigame in which you have to kill a certain amount of nobody's favorite Final Fantasy recurring Cacti in a restricted time span. The kicker is that these cactuar have varying resistances that force the player to switch up their strategy to combo and kill. In theory this sounds like an engaging minigame to take part in, perhaps getting creative with movesets and attack combos. In reality though you're using Yuffie and Aerith to frantically take out these repulsively loud enemies in an awfully short period of time, stressed to hit a score that is definitely too high for the amount of time given and the ease it is to be docked points when you're hit. Add the awfully repulsive volume and frequency in which these cactuar make noise and you'll wish it was never a part of the game. That's my take on sidequest and tertiary content of FFVII Rebirth. You could offer the rebuttal to the above of "just don't do it," but there's unfortunately a sizable amount of useful material, gear, and experience stowed away within.

Not far removed from the amount of fights that these minigames and secondary content throws you into is my qualm with the combat and weapon upgrading at large within Rebirth. Final Fantasy VII Remake largely got it right, with fights that could be repetitive but it was pretty well split between humanoid enemies within Shinra and fiends that were found within the world. Bossfights weren't recycled for the most part, and they weren't perfect, but they were doable and outside of the Rufus fight... pretty easy to get through on your first go. Rebirth flips that one on its head and says "how about we bring a lot of those boss fights back, make you fight the same people two, three, maybe four times, and make the combat harder just because." Too many times to count was I getting hit by room-wide AOE's that I had to pre-plan for, of which could wipe my party to zero. Too many times were Barrett and Aerith being targeted by moves that they legitimately could not dodge out of because their i-frames don't exist and their rolls take them three feet one way. You'll get hit by everything and it'll hurt. Now I beat Remake three times, zero of those on hard, but I never felt that the game was too difficult. I didn't per se with Rebirth either, but every boss fight took WAY too long. Enemies felt like sponges and the stagger/pressure conditions on most of these boss encounters were infuriating. Add that into a reused offering of the special foes you fight, the frequency of which you do so, and many of these fights having pause points where you can't do damage because the boss needs to get a voice line/cutscene/move in, and you have an exhausting endeavor. That's my major gripe with this title, it's exhausting in all the wrong ways. I don't have an inherent issue with long games, pointing at Red Dead Redemption 2 and Persona's 4 and 5 for example. What these games do is give you ample moments to rest between monotonous moments of grind or boss-fighting. Rebirth throws it at you for effectively the entire ninety some hour runtime. Fights are long, against bosses and world enemies alike, and you never really feel... strong, an issue which may sound doltish to complain about but damnit after spending the entire first game being a badass SOLDIER with a crew of badasses, I want to feel like a badass! There was never a point in which I felt like I was amply handling world or story enemies with ease, despite being appropriately leveled. Sometimes you do just want to gun down a room of Shinra soldiers and get on with it, you don't always need to hit Yeoman First Class-Kun with forty buster sword hits to fell him. Simply, I felt like you as a powerful character who is tasked with destroying one of gaming's most sinister villains never actually feel as strong as you should and it removes some of the buy-in I had to the narrative pacing of Rebirth.

Another element to this game that made the character power of this game feel off was the way character levelling is done. Gone is the "yeah that makes sense" of Remake in favor of an obfuscated sphere grid that puts emphasis on party synergy over physically endorsing the strength/power of each character. I get that the larger cast makes this make more sense as an approach to take, but man does it just... not feel good. Remake's Intermission episode that came out with the Intergrade release forecasted the inevitability of Rebirth putting an emphasis on team-based combat, so I knew this was coming, but I think Rebirth goes about it the wrong way. Instead of letting you choose between stronger individuality and a cohesive team approach to combat, you're effectively forced into the latter. Even then though, it's just giving your party members more capabilities to synergize with each other and execute maneuvers with more and more members of your team. Once more, I understand why they did this but I think it throws the heroic power that the narrative beckons for into the gutter in favour of a misaligned execution of party mechanics.

Add these issues in with other slight complaints like the Kingdom-Heartsification of how FAST enemies move around the arena, and also an entire chapter where you play as Cait Sith for too long (longer than one minute) and you have a title I wish I liked a lot more than I did. It pains me to say, with how much I anticipated Final Fantasy VII Rebirth that the Final Fantasy VII parts were largely the only things I enjoyed about this game. I had this marked on my calendar for months, avoiding any demo content, and trailers, any State of Play material, because I enjoyed Remake so much. Due to the effects of Ubisoft on the industry, there’s too much content, most of which I found to be lacking of any real sort of enjoyment. I thought Rebirth would continue to put an effortless cherry on top of the dessert that was the original Final Fantasy VII. Instead they created a new dish and man, I wouldn't order it again. It seems the public at large enjoy it and critical reception of Rebirth is high, but I don't know if I could recommend it to anyone.

Pyre is a resoundingly "okay" game that was honestly pretty good but unfortunately the runtime went a little longer than I felt it needed. For me it was a typical Supergiant experience: Top of the line visuals (namely in character design,) impressive work put in an original world, a dedicated Darren Korb soundtrack, and a unique gimmick that drives gameplay. I liked it quite a bit more than Transistor and Bastion, though not as much as Hades, because I felt like the gameplay loop until you have to repeat it ad nauseum was fairly entertaining. Space basketball is a pretty neat concept and I'd like to see it explored more in a game down the line, but the loop felt a little stagnant as Pyre went on. I will say that initially I was upset that I had to change up my party as the game went on to get the actual ending of the game, but I appreciated the nuances different character archetypes brought to Pyre. Ultimately I felt like some of battles against NPC's felt like they were simply waiting for my reaction or cheating the AI reaction timing to certain things, but overall it was fine.

In the end, I found Pyre to be a simply "good" game and nothing really more than that. The runtime went a bit longer than my liking, but I'd consider this to be one of Supergiant's better titles. I'd recommend it to anyone who can catch it on sale or is a fan of their material in general.

Dragon's Dogmeh

I feel like I've been collectively gaslit by the gaming world for the better part of a decade after finally getting to play Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen. Throughout the past eleven years post release, I'd heard of Dragon's Dogma as this legendary cult classic from Capcom that championed a great game filled with the Western approach to wizardry and fantasy. A process unlike myself, I bought DD before really looking into anything about how it played or what made people so excited for its incoming sequel. I figured that as a fan of Capcom's marquee titles and RPG's rich in scope and lore in general that I would take to it, but I did not. It's like ordering a Whopper because you thought you were going to get a succulent juicy hamburger like in the photo, but instead you got two patties enveloped in year old mayonnaise and someone's Burger King Foot Lettuce.

This is genuinely one of the worst looking games I've played, and I will go as far to say that playing Metal Gear Solid (a 1998 release) for the first time a year or two ago, I'd rather look at the four polygons that make up Otacon's face than half the characters in DD. Everyone looks so... off, a far cry from how great Capcom's facial and character design would look a few years down the line. In terms of the character elements of DD, the VA is real real real bad, which is unfortunate because there are some recognizable names, most notably David Lodge, but the title simply feels bad to listen to.

The narrative is... boring, effectively not existing until the latter half of the second act, and then materializing moreso in the third. Nothing really inspires you to care about this drab and boring world. Even Shadow of the Colossus, a game I absolutely despised at least looked more interesting and had more intrigue into its boneless landscape, Dragon's Dogma's world and capital city of Grandsys just kinda feel like Diet Water. For how much you have to run in this game, which is a lot, the world does little to nothing to engage with the player. Recycled enemies placed in locations just simply because the devs felt like they needed enemies, which breaks the rhythm of travel, made traversal feel worse than it already did. Because the devs don't believe in fast travel, something ultimately too convenient and useful, you have to run from point A to point B and then back to point A every time. This feels awful the first time you do it, and then the second time, and then the third time, and so on and so forth. Add into the mix that you're operating off of a scant stamina bar outside of hub worlds and your perception of getting anywhere in a reasonable amount of time crumbles to dust.

My real favorite part about Dragon's Dogma is how the damage is calculated. In most RPG's, and many games outside of the genre, you have a clear progression route for weapons and gear. You start weak and then upgrade your way to bigger and better items. In a game like Dark Souls for example, you have clear points in which you realize you should probably be levelling up your weapons, it's those moments where you're conceivably doing less damage to enemies and bosses than you feel like you should. You can still conquer any foe, but you have to put in more and more work when the world becomes stronger and your weapons relatively become weaker. In DD, your weapons at a certain point simply do not hurt the enemy. This concept is so laughably flawed that I found myself doing the Jackie Chan meme face from like fifteen years ago at my computer screen on multiple occasions. I get having a sign of "maybe you should upgrade your weapons" but getting into it with a group of bandits or goblins and slapping Sauron with a literal wet noodle that didn't even touch the health bar was incredibly bad game design.

I'm adding another miscellaneous complaint here about silent protagonism. I love having this emotional and lore heavy moment going on and my character is just standing there, mouth agape like she was waiting for a bowl of Golden Grahams with a little itty bitty scoop of milk included. For a game that relies upon the actions of your character and how they shape the entire world at large for the infinite future, there is a resounding lack of feeling important in Dragon's Dogma.

I can't recommend this game for anyone, and it solely (along with dev comments about fast travel) made me take any interest in the sequel away. It's ugly, it plays ugly, it's dated, it's Dragon's Dogmeh.

Honestly Fragmentary Passage has been the first Kingdom Hearts title in a long time for me to show legitimate promise. Though it may be a glorified tech demo for what KH3 was to become, it's a sign that the KH team seems to understand that a no frills combat system coupled with a more focused view of the lore is what makes this franchise interesting.

There isn't much to love about Fragmentary Passage, but there isn't a lot to dislike either in its ~two hour runtime. It's pretty, scored well, plays well, and honestly thats all I wanted out of it before I start the third mainline game.

Dream Drop Distance is a game so mystifyingly poorly outlined in narrative scope and creative ambition that I have a genuine confusion as to its existence as a title. There's a lot of legitimately interesting lore packed into the latest moments of this game that players jumping and tentatively becoming uninterested would have no earthly idea of its existence.

What sees you as both Sora and Rikku world hopping from select Disney properties eventually involves some of the entire KH story's most important figures and integral plots. Not only was the story pacing misaligned, but difficulty and overambitious mechanic additions muddy what could have been a rather interesting title.

Whatever compelled Nomura and company to add another confusing and unnecessarily obtuse mechanic in its Chao-Buddy-Pal Thing system is a mystery to me. Just because you're adding another game in the series doesn't mean you need to reinvent the wheel on combat... just make it playable. DDD adds an entirely new layer and forces the player to learn it for no additional value. Couple this with routine gimmick boss fights and you have a beyond frustrating game to actually... play.

Enemy design is again repetitive, but what is most worthy of scorn is once more the inundated placement of monotonous foes throughout each realm you visit. It's one thing to fight the same group of enemies, its another when you are doing so at every single clearing/zone possible, and its another when you're doing it twice over as the game sees you re-tread each world you visit as both Rikku and Sora. I don't understand the infatuation with the KH dev team to force the player into physically playing the same locations (this is twice in a row now with Birth By Sleep) just to soak in some extra narrative. They explain it in DDD, but could and should have easily been bypassed through other means. It's alright to do things once... sort of, but making you run through everything you've just seen to move the story along is inexcusable.

Dream Drop Distance really could have been something interesting if it pressed the story that makes KH actually interesting into the earlier elements of the game, drip feeding it throughout, instead of waiting until the last moments of the title to do so.

If a Nothing Burger was a Soulslike

I first caught wind of Asterigos: Curse of the Stars while watching an Iron Pineapple video while eating lunch. IP (as I'll abbreviate it) is a Soulsborne youtuber who has a long running series where he plays Souls-likes and Souls-like accessories that have flown under the radar, are in their demo phase, or look mildly interesting. A vast majority of these games end up as student projects, proof of concepts, or one man game jams that while present themselves as neat in theory, are at the end of the day generally not worth the time. It's not often during an IP video that I see a game being played and want to try it for myself, not because of him, but because the games are as I said usually lower in budget and/or scope. Asterigos was one of very few that sat with me enough to wishlist on Steam and eventually purchase. What I saw in the little gameplay exposition was a Souls-like that seemed fairly fleshed in its mechanics in a world that looked, full. What I ended up getting was true to that nature, however the magic of its intrigue faded almost as soon as you get into the game.

My review for Asterigos will not be that long because it really just plays like one of the games of all time, nothing that I would bug people to throw at the front of their backlog, but nothing I would rush to convince people to avoid. Combat is basic and uninteresting, with Hilda (the main character) capable of wielding two weapons off of four different button inputs. Interesting in theory but as a sword+shield user as my main weapon, I seldom ever found the need to use my secondary. Not only did it feel redundant, but the material and currency upkeep required to upgrade it was too high. I didn't want to grind out multiple weapons and upgrade them at the smithy, as I didn't feel like that would accentuate my combative capabilities enough. Dodgeroll and attacking is the backbone of quite literally every encounter in this game, parrying completely unnecessary, which in the end made me feel like the devs wanted to make a Souls game but didn't want to flavour the soup to turn the combat into anything unique.

The influences apparent as they are in just about every title within this subgenre, but outside of the setting and attempt at a story there was generally nothing new about this title. I'll give the devs credit for putting in a lot of time and effort into creating a story that had legs on its own and that followed the protagonist throughout the entire journey, but the unfortunate part is that they forgot to make it interesting. None of the characters are particularly memorable, their appearances being drab and milquetoast play a large part in this, and the voice acting was largely poor. For what is presumably a lower budget title this isn't surprising, however it does make the buy-in tougher. I recently played Lies of P within the last calendar year and that title from a mostly unknown team outperformed Asterigos in waves with their character design, VA work, environmental storytelling, and plot pacing. Though I had frustrations with Lies of P (mostly due to difficulty spikes,) it was a much better take on the genre in its variety and scope that Asterigos is.

To the mention of enemy difficulty, Asterigos wasn't hard per se, however I felt like every world enemy and boss past the initial sequence (even on max weapon upgrade and a highly leveled attack skill) became sponges. There's a point in fighting redundant enemies in games where I swing my sword, or whatever weapon I'm using, and say "okay I get it" as I swing for the nth time at their body where I realize that it's not going to get any better. That was Asterigos. You fight a very limited pool of enemies of varying degrees of hitpoints, and you use the exact same approach in doing so. Nothing changed from the first five hours of the game to the last five in the way I fought. While not the end-all indictment of a game, it's not a shining mark on a title that already doesn't have too many legs to stand on.

I can't recommend Asterigos to anybody unless they're looking for a resoundingly boring game that they can run through and test their dodge-roll reflexes.

Baldur's Deflate 3

It's been a long time coming and it's finally came, for Bun B Weepboop to get his shot at the game and the results are... well... we beat it? Last year was filled with a plethora of large-scale video game releases and unfortunately a finite amount of time to play them. In my quest to play as many GOTY nominees and new titles as I could, I had to prioritize games based upon the feasibility of completing them within a certain time frame and their general approach of play. In deciding how I wanted to tackle the year, this led myself to selecting long RPG's like Final Fantasy XVI and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in lieu of other nominees like Marvel's Spiderman 2 and the relevant Baldur's Gate 3. I dodged Baldur's Gate largely because of the time investment necessary and my life embarking on an increasingly busier schedule, but a large part of my avoidance came down to the fact that it is a Larian Studios CRPG. I'd previously put thirty or forty hours into Divinity Original Sin 2 to milquetoast results, the game was fun to play with friends but its open-ended quest design and generally uninteresting world and narrative failed to pull me in. With Baldur's Gate 3 finally on sale and a new year on the horizon, I purchased it with the intent to play it as soon as I returned to my home and computer following a vacation.

Just about everyone I know fell head over heels with this game, either because they were D&D heads and had finally gotten their video game manifestation of the years playing the legendary tabletop IP, or because they found the near infinite possibilities of exploration and quest-solving attractive. I lent my ear to each of these people and their affinity towards BG3, happy for them to get the lengthy RPG it seemed forever wanted by the gaming world, but thinking I would personally never touch the game. I asked and listened to each one my friends and peers about the who's, what's, when's, and why's of why Baldur's Gate 3 was so good before I ever thought about my purchase. The common answers melted down to the lengthy involved questlines, rich world with decades of lore attached, a complicated D&D combat and world traversal mechanic, and a narrative ever so mysterious. Going into it, this was quite attractive for the most part, despite gaming as a genre having been fairly in depth and mechanically significant since the advent of the new millennia, it's felt like we've been continuously chasing a title in which our choices sincerely mattered and the agency of us within a fantasy world was paramount. If only this legitimately held true in Baldur's Gate... more to come on that later.

I'll start with what I liked about the game, and maybe that will diverge into my issues and qualms with it as well, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. One of the many things I didn't like about Divinity Original Sin 2 (DOS2) was its heightened level of ambiguity in quest design and locations. The journal, or attempt at one, within the game would say things along the like of "Well we talked to a wizard, wizards know magic, maybe somewhere on this island there is a wizard who likes magic a lot" and that would be your clue to find a magic spell to continue upon your journey, without an indication of where specifically to go. Of course this is a slight hyperbole but it was a microcosm of a challenge I had with narrative direction in Larian's previous large scale effort. In BG3 I largely didn't have that issue, as there was a "show on map" option for many of the questlines, all of which seemed to quickly update for new direction once new information was discovered along the journey. I've ranted and raved about quest marker design and the general lack of knowing where to go in games quite often in my reviews thus far, and I have to give credit to Larian for understanding the QoL this brings to BG3. I don't have the wherewithal anymore to exhaustingly read each note or follow each fine word of dialogue as to my next movements within the story, that would be unfair to the average gamer and attention span within the 21st century. What I do have is the ability to recollect summarized information and work with general hints as to where to move next, and BG3 did a fairly good jo overall with that.

Outside of that, there were a few items in which I was generally impressed with BG3 and greatly surprised about going into it. Majorly was the effort put into making the characters of the game complicated and fleshed out against the lukewarm and mostly uninteresting narrative at hand. Each character within your party, should you recruit them (of which I successfully did with each able NPC,) is vastly different and has their own motivations to move through the world and story of Baldur's Gate. Your interactions and conversation with Karlach will forever and always be different than they are with Astarion, and likewise with Gale, Shadowheart, etc... Though I had significant issues with the way a majority of these plotlines resolve, I have to give the staff at Larian some serious credit for crafting the stories of your constituents and making them relevant all the way until the end of the title. In an RPG, the motivations behind your party members to continue along the journey with the main character is integral for creating a believable and striking story. Even in some of my favorite titles of all time, the mark here is missed (cough Final Fantasy cough,) but BG3 was able to tie in the cast with the story. For the most part this was a success, and this is tough to do without divulging spoilers, but one of my most significant gripes with this game was the actual difference you make in their lives upon the completion of the game. Though I felt like the characters were intricately written and different from one another, each with their own needs and values that applied to defeating the big bad and moving on with their lives, I couldn't help to care for just about any of them.

In an effort to be unique, I felt like certain party members were different just for the sake of being different and had no legitimate value to care for. Like Gale is cool and all, and his plight of being an effective walking bomb is tragic, but what does he really do in conversation or in act throughout the entire 90 hour+ runtime for me to care about? Shadowheart's questline involves a deep and serious conversation about her faith and life up until the events of BG3, but why does that matter to me? Again, Wyll's character dilemma involves a binding contract with a devil that it is up to me and the gang to resolve... but why? And why does everything have to be an ultimatum? This felt like a cheap narrative mechanic that the majority of successful western RPG's I enjoy do not use. It's fine to have a tragic ending, it's okay to have characters die, but when you understand that each of the cast members within BG3 are going to have some tragic ultimatum at the end of their respective questlines, that becomes tired. I look at Mass Effect for example, another party based western RPG that I consider to be amongst my holy trinity (ME3, RDR2, and The Witcher 3,) which sees Commander Shepard and the Boys take on galactic big bads with the fate of the universe on the line. Your party members from game to game have their respective tragedies and relevance to the survival of the Normandy and galaxy, but they don't all involve some frustrating stipulation you have to grapple with at the end. One of my major gripes with BG3 is thus, resolving most of these questlines involves a sacrifice or impactful decision that doesn't feel necessary for the story of the game, rather just for emotional shock value. I cared about characters like Karlach, Astarion (sort of,) and Shart, but did I care about them enough to make the grand decision they are asking about? The answer resoundingly was no. In essence I felt like BG3 attempted to make the resolution of these questlines filled with a faux sense of gravity, and I'm not a fan of that.

You have a lot of scenes take place in camp with this cast in the first and second acts of the game, just for them to completely disappear in the third. I wasn't a fan of this rug pull as it personally felt like they ran out of ideas to make the in-between moments of BG3 interesting and focused on the players self-investigation of the end of the story.

I think a part of this manifested in the romance of the game, something that just about all my BG3 "super-fan" friends were quite into. Part of the fun in open-world/zone RPG's in which you control the avatar or social relationships of is choosing which of the games cast members you want to link up with. Now, I didn't really care about anyone in BG3 to that degree, as mentioned above most of the cast greatly waned on me in terms of care and motive, but I did try to pursue one for the why not of it all. This didn't work out, despite playing their storyline to perfection and pursuing their questline in the best of their interest, with max intrapersonal affinity, all because I missed a scene in Act 1. Now imagine I'm trying to move along the story and complete this game some forty hours later and can't move on with their relationship because of some error I didn't even know I didn't make in the first act. This more than anything felt cheap, as the game had not made any gravity of said moment clear down the line and did not indicate to me that I had missed anything. Several characters within the story approached my avatar for a relationship even though I didn't embark on this massive journey for them, and it had me pondering why this was so complex, and for what reason? Other RPG's made these romance and relationship checks much more cut and dry, and it worked far better in those scenarios. I hope the reader sees this moreso as a qualm with the lack of clarity in relaying plot/story checks to the player than anything else.


I've spoken on it a little before too, but the narrative of this game, something I thought would be the strong point of a near 100 hour experience, was genuinely unimpressive. It relies on a fairly tired fantasy trope in a world I as the player was wildly unfamiliar with. The story simply felt like something I was working towards, and not working with. The narrative at no point rather than the closing scenes of each act, felt like something I was actively involved in. There was no real attempt at worldbuilding, rather just letting you interact and converse with the denizens of the land about the respective plights within each act. I don't know, maybe as a Final Fantasy Fan (I hate that alliteration,) I'm a little spoiled about worldbuilding, but outside of the city of Baldur's Gate itself, do you really ever feel like you truly belong or understand the world of this title? My answer to that rhetorical is no. Even in a game like FFX, a short little cinematic of Tidus and the Blitzboys in Zanarkand gives you enough inference upon how the world is within that game. Beginning BG3 in a crashing Nautiloid with some vagrants who would inevitably become your party members, and no real hub world until the last act made me impartial to the world at large. Sure you have some inns and rests along the way, and a camp to call home but... it never felt to me like a place where I could see myself living in (in a fantasy setting.) Environmental buy in is something that matters to me a lot in a title like this, something that the aforementioned Witcher 3 knocked out of the park, going a mile to make the world Geralt takes on the Wild Hunt in feel like it’s a place he needs to defend and call home. In Baldur's Gate 3, in conjunction with the abrupt beginning of the game, I felt like I was rushed into a world I did not know, and simply had to pursue a big bad that was dead set on the destruction of a city I had never been to and did not care for. My plea throughout the ultimate act of BG3 to Larian Studios was to please make me care about this game, please make me care about these characters, please make me care about this world. The onus of buy-in should not be imparted upon the player, rather demonstrated by the game, and that I personally feel like BG3 missed out on by a country mile.

Another qualm I had with BG3 was the fact that I generally am not a fan of D&D, and not for the lack of trying. Now you may say, you idiot why are you playing a long winded narrative set in the historic world of D&D that utilizes D&D mechanics if you don't like D&D? I would reply with, well shut up! But, what comes with that is an unfamiliarity and general annoyance with the way the non-lore aspects of that IP are set up. To begin, every single aspect of this game is a dice roll... and I understand the reasoning behind that as I have played multiple campaigns of D&D, there is a nuance to discovery, speech, and combat that relies upon the chance of dice. Of course your character's intrinsic stats player a role in the success rate of these encounters, but largely you are at the mercy of chance. I dislike this... a lot, it makes for a bad video game experience. Is it true to form for the tabletop version of this IP? Yes! Do I like having to roll a dice for things like opening a chest that has two apples and a rotted herring? No! Do I like having to roll the dice because I'm trying to convince a talking cat to roll over on its paws? No! Do I like having to intimidate and persuade on a dice roll just to simply convince someone they smell funny? Also no. Of course those are probably all made up scenarios, but a general pull on the plight I had in the minutiae of BG3's over-reliance on dice rolls. For this reason combat was also aggressively annoying, every hit no matter how close or logical relied upon another series of hidden dice rolls. You had your chance to hit, the chance for the enemy to retort, the chance for an opportunity attack, the chance for a saving throw, the chance for this, the chance for that... it made for some seemingly unending fights with an over-reliance on re-loads, lest you wish to take the brunt of being burnt by RNG. I may be a little burnt after playing several Fire Emblem titles within the last year, in which the simple majority in an accuracy chart meant that you were likely to hit your opponent for full damage, but in BG3 with a 90% chance or greater likelihood to hit, I missed a frustratingly large amount. I legitimately never felt confident in my attacks, be it melee or at range, and again I understand this is true to D&D but man, it also felt true to a rather lukewarm combat experience.

To further the conversation about combat and a foreign experience with the inner trappings of D&D's long running history, I take issue with the fact that Larian did not feel it necessary to simplify or explain just about any of the mechanics of combat and status effects within the game. I hope you know what all the status effects do and how they combine, I hope you are privy to the advantages and weaknesses of spells and cantrips already, because this will not be tutorialized in the slightest for the player. I've joked before with my brother and friends about the tutorial section of Persona 5 and how it effectively lasts the first fifty hours of the >100 hour experience, but you know what it does do? Adequately explain the workings of another storied franchise and its involved mechanics and submechanics. Baldur's Gate has even more going on in the way that strengths, weaknesses, spells, counter-spells, and all the like interact, and it does almost zero to explain this to the player. Of course, should you have enough time to rival that of twenty year WoW vets to read every subtext of items and spells and their effects, you might know, but to the average joe these will go largely unexplained through the runtime of the game. Combine a obfuscated combat system with the "Oops-All-Enemies" nature of this game and you're in for a largely aggravating time. There were too many fights to count that started with the enemies of BG3 outnumbering your party four or more to one. This isn't the worst... in theory until you remember everyone has to act once before your turn relapses. I was in one of the last fights of the game just now and spent most of my time on the app formerly known as twitter, talking to a group of pals rather than having my hands on the keyboard ready to counteract whoever I was in combat with, because it took that long. This was uniform throughout an unfortunately long period of the game, outnumbered and outgunned, fighting powerful bosses that had their own unexplained gimmicks solved best by google and re-loaded trial and error rather than by working through the games motions. I get that its true to D&D to have fights in which the player is greatly disadvantaged in number and in locale, but as I mentioned above it really just makes for a gameplay experience most foul. I get why the narrative would want me to be locked in with a boss who has more than 600 hp and a cohort of demonic followers fighting at his behest, but is it fun? The answer reluctantly is no. This happened time and time again with slight variation, and I felt like what began as an enriching open-world experienced eventually led to a frustrating rehash of mechanics I disliked, over and over again.

Miscellaneous complaints to round this review out revolve around silent protagonism, a plethora of crashes and performance issues, and the abhorrent long rest mechanic. I chuckled a little too often at the emotionally heavy moments within the game in which a motivation speech was needed, or my character was having a heart to shadow-heart, only for my avatar to nod and say dialogue through text. I get that there's a lot of dialogue necessary in a game like this, and Larian likely wanted to truly convey that our avatar was an extension of ourselves... but to me it just felt like I was playing a boneless NPC. I did not feel like I mattered at all within the story, I was simply a vehicle for the plot. I did not understand my code of ethics, did I even have any? I couldn't grasp why anyone would consider me to be their leader or friend, I'd never even said a word. Baldur's Gate simply did not do a good job, in my humblest opinion, of making you the player character feel like a worthwhile member of your party. You could ask yourself "Who really is the main character" and I don't know if there's an answer.

In the end, I can't recommend Baldur's Gate 3 to anyone who values a strong narrative, freetime, or a game worth playing. It was pretty, I didn't want to put it down, but it eventually became a frustrating gameplay experience in a world I found largely uninteresting.

I fell into a burning ring of fire
I went down, down, down
And the flames went higher
And it burns, burns, burns
The ring of fire

One of the games of all time.

I bought Transistor to see what all the hype was about amongst my circle of pals and general internet at large. After greatly enjoying Hades, a game in a genre I'm generally uninterested in, and not enjoying Bastion, I didn't know exactly how I'd wind up with Transistor.

There are things I like about Supergiant that they seem to knock out of the park each time: the music (thanks Darren Korb) and an isolated experience with an incredible art team supporting what's going on the screen.

What I don't like about Supergiant is after continuing to play their games is just about everything else within them. Hades, Bastion, and now Transistor have left me wanting a lot more in the combat of their titles. Transistor relies on intricate comboing of powers within a melding of real-time and turn based action, giving the player in theory agency as to how to set up engagements and take out the field in front of them. Where Transistor went wrong for me was exactly where Bastion also went wrong, a recycled and generally monotonous field of enemies that were barely improved or made more difficult throughout the game. This in addition to me discovering (through a direct recommendation) an "optimal" power combo made it so I could perma-stun entire fields of enemies and simply hold down the attack button to win. I wasn't struggling per se beforehand, but fights were taking a little longer than they should have... but why wouldn't I just look for the strongest combo and use that? I feel like this an intrinsic issue with the game, the way the combat is structured is that its more or less made to be broken, and the fighting in Supergiant games is already basic enough that this doesn't really do much for me.

There were several other elements of the loadouts and combat that I didn't like. The first being that you lose one power set temporarily when you die, having to come across checkpoints to grant you these back. I just... kinda hate this? It felt like an even worse take on the Fromsoft punishment formula, why am I being penalized even further for losing than having to retry a zone, why are you reducing my firepower as well? Secondly, I felt like Transistor does a generally poor job explaining literally anything in regards to mechanics or combo ability.

Outside of the fighting, I felt like the narrative was remarkably difficult to buy in to or give really any care about. The game stars a pair of lovers in peril, a woman named Red in love with a sword who apparently used to be her betrothed? I played this game for a live studio audience and had to ask a lot of questions for that to make sense. I don't know, and maybe its a general problem with how I consume media, but it's extremely hard for me to feel sorrow or buy in to the romantic plight of characters who I've barely known or were present before the events of the story took place. Why should I feel bad for these characters of whom I have never seen demonstrate love? Why should I demonstrate pity for a sword who was once a man that I've never met and never will meet outside of vaguely narrating the plot of the game? Sword-kun simply did not strike me as an empathetic entity within the game and I feel like the runtime and cold open played a significant part in that. I even got to the final boss and kept asking questions about the narrative would go, not knowing that the game had abruptly ended and I was viewing the credits.

There were simply no moments within Transistor in which I wanted to care about Transistor, which is as much of an indictment upon a title that I can give. Perhaps its me being spoiled by narrative driven games like Red Dead Redemption 2 or Nier: Replicant in which the long party exposition sort of forces the player to care about those around them, but Transistor had none of that. I had no reason to care about the characters, no reason to care about the world, no nothing. Between this, combat that left a plethora of things to be desired, and my least favorite Darren Korb composition to date, I can't recommend Transistor to anyone.

Fire Emblem: Route the Enemy

It's a tough topic to crack every time I work retroactively through a franchise or through the general chronology of gaming, is it fair to review a title based upon how much better its successors are in their respective elements and takes on the formula of games beforehand? My answer to this question is generally, well yeah. This ranges in severity and reason based upon limitations of tech and what was generally accepted within media at the time of release, but generally speaking I critique media that I engage with in the year that I am doing so. If I were to play Pong in the newly minted 2024, I don't think I'd be quick to call it the greatest thing since sliced butter. Therein lies a major qualm with Fire Emblem: Awakening, it's 2019 (eventual) successor did just about everything better.

I didn't grow up an Emblemy-boi, not really touching the series outside of Smash Bros until Three Houses dropped as a worldwide phenomenon in the fresher days of the Nintendo Switch. I mention this to say that the Fire Emblem formula and tactics as a whole was greatly lost on me in my early days of gaming. I played a metric ton of RTS' and shooters, but didn't come pre-booted with the intrinsic knowledge of THE GRID. What Awakening doesn't do well is offer players any real ideology as to why things are the way they are and the way things should be. I had no idea that S ranking my social links meant I was locked in to a marriage, sorry not sorry Sumia but I had to reload a save when I found out you and Robin were tying the knot. I was completely in the dark about the second generation units and the way to obtain them, not understanding if stats were any better or if they were worthwhile as characters to unlock. There were several missions that I missed out on recruitable characters because I wasn't briefed on the fact that Google Chrom had to be the one talking to them. On top of all of this, between missing out on certain powerful allies and offspring of my own militia, the class system made no real sense to me? I got my characters to level ten and then bought advanced seals to upgrade them to new classes, but did that really do anything? I don't know! Maybe I'm spoiled again here by Three Houses, but having one upgrade for each unit made levelling feel almost pointless, I got them to their one spot and then had no real interaction with their well-being outside of sending them off to the frontlines. There's a theme here with all of this, and its a general lack of information to people who were fresh to the game. I was enjoying my time with the majority of the first half of Awakening until its cracks began to show, and the lack of information was the first domino to really fall.

The plot of Awakening falls apart hilariously fast, and I'll avoid spoilers here but as soon as I realized the direction that Chrom and the Funky Bunch were headed into I did an exacerbated eye roll and pounded eight mountain dews. I applaud Three Houses (and NOT Engage) for its ability to create a grounded interpolitical storyline and stick to it, of course 3H has a story grounded at heart in the supernatural, but all the way into the end it managed to keep the Edelgard-centric conflict in its heart. Where Awakening lost me on the story element was trying to do a Final-Fantasy-esque "There's an even bigger bad" and then have you chase the literal and proverbial dragon for a little too long. I don't know, the plot device Awakening uses just becomes pretty tired after the amount of media I've engaged with the literal exact same concept. You can tell the character writers of Awakening got really excited at the concept of having their main villain being an all knowing omniscient who liked to twist his mustache and say "tee-hee" not unlike comic book baddies in the days of yore.

The story was pretty milquetoast, but man the characters even more so... but there is good!!! Robin, an avatar character with actual dialogue... and personality??? It's doable! Wowza! Gee-Willkers! Woah nelly!! I appreciate after Alear and Byleth having a character with actual agency in a story that they were the center-piece of. While Robin and Chrom are effectively equally important to the movement of the narrative, the former matters more to the fate of the world (though Chrom is still yet integral.) Having the two develop a sort of bro-mance relationship was neat, like Claude and Byleth in the Golden Deer route of Three Houses, except this time I heard more direct motivation and general intelligence out of the character I controlled. Unfortunately this is refreshing because silent/player-driving protags in the current gamerspace oft fall victim to becoming boneless. Robin actually being able to debate strategy and plot with Chrom was pretty neat. Unfortunately though they're like the only two characters in the entire game who were really worthwhile to talk to.

The majority of the rest of the roster falls victim to "type-cast" disease which is a fate shared by many a Fire Emblem character. You can boil down a resoundingly large amount of your allies to their one gimmick or shtick, giving me as their commanding officer no real reason to care for them or keep them around. Maybe I'm spoiled by games that have done party-driven casts better like Mass Effect or Persona, but man it's harder and harder with every Fire Emblem I play to care even a smidgen about half my roster, especially in a game where they don't really interact outside of the poorly written supports. It's like that meme of Patrick coming home in Spongebob and lifting up his rock-house to say "WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE." That's how it felt when I'd scroll through the roster to add members to fight in my mission. Half of the characters I legitimately forgot about (I had no idea who Stahl was in the postgame credit sequence for example,) and then the rest were simply employed just because of their combat ability.

The laundry list would be too long if I went through them one by one but there were a few so hilariously poorly written that I have to name. First is Tharja, who I thought about romancing with Robin because a friend told me she was neat. She was not neat, she begins her first support link with Robin informing him that she watched him sleep through the night and counted his breaths. RED FLAG. I gave up on her and romanced Olivia thereafter. Kellum wanted you to remember in every single opportunity that he was easily forgotten. Lon'Qu was scared of women, because tee-hee haha, women scary!!! If he wasn't a good unit I would have cast him aside. And seriously, who the f*** is Donnel??? For the first time in my experience with a Fire Emblem, and this is as someone who has beaten Three Houses eight times, I got up during the credits sprawl when it informs you of the post-game happenings of your party and went and got some water and used the restroom. Even with a mobile console in my hands I couldn't be asked to care about this cast. Character writing in this game felt half-baked at best, giving us a cast of one dimensional "friends" who felt like they came out of a gimmick-generator rather than a team trying to put together a memorable roster of allies.

I have smaller qualms with Awakening that have effectively been fixed in the titles (that I've played) since this release. First is the most apparent and biggest issue I had outside of the absent depth of the characters, and that was the lack of any sort of hub zone with your party. What Three Houses did with Garreg Mach, and even Engage with Somniel, was create a place for you to soak in and exist with your party. I'm all for moments in games that lend you time for character exposition and events that humanize the cast outside of its main characters. Three Houses having areas that allow you to dine, sing, train, garden, and even sip tea with your peers was a great way to make them seem important and give weight to the downtime in between pivotal moments within the narrative. In Awakening you're jumping from one big story moment to the next, no real time in between, with the only exposition you get being the supports and barracks moments you get from pairing people up on the battlefield. The bottom line is that I wanted to find reasons to care about my fellow soldiers, even if their stories and personalities were half-baked, but I wasn't given the real room to do so.

I have other issues with things like weapon-repair being fiscally unrealistic and the Predator-like AI that hunted your healers/support units as if they were a hawk finding mice on the open plane, but those pail in gravity with what I've written above.

I did like the game though overall, but I don't see what makes it so "special" after playing an infinitely better game within the franchise. Though the 3DS is a flawed system in that it's mobile and can only push its processing power so far, I liked how Awakening's movies pushed it to its limit. The little moments that you get seeing Chrome and Lucina within the game's CGI was pretty dang cool, a maneuver I'm sure wasn't easy but I felt paid off pretty well. Tactics games existing on a grid only allow the in-game engine to tell certain levels of story through actions built into the game itself. Taking short spots to act out certain integral plot elements within the mini-movies gave these short events within the narrative some extra weight.

Outside of Chrom/Robin being pretty great characters and the neat use Intelligent Systems got out of the 3DS, I liked the ability to play without permadeath as I understand that was mostly foreign to the series beforehand. Call me a noob if you want, but I'm glad I got to retain my entire roster throughout the random 2% hit crits by the enemies, I still played long battles and powered on against the odds, I just did it in a realistic use of my time. On that note, I felt like the levels were appropriate in length, though the win-conditions were hilariously limited (route the enemy versus defeat the commander,) I felt like I didn't spend an egregious time on any map or have to navigate through unscrupulous environments.

While I am glad I've played Awakening and I'm even more glad it "saved" Fire Emblem, which gave me one of my all time favorite titles, I don't think it's really the bees knees. Three Houses is just a better game (in my opinion, because this is my review) overall and I can't foresee any reason to crack open Awakening in favor of it. While my first-half experience with it was pretty great and I had it temporarily ranked as a 4.5/5, that greatly waned as the plot moved along and the narrative suffered from its lack of legitimate ambition. I can't recommend anyone play Awakening, but if you have a 3DS I imagine this is a game you may already own.