Games like this are always a bit of an odd one for me because oh how irritating I find them if they’re done even slightly wrong. Self-aware games that basically serve to parody existing titles and genres always run the risk of coming off as insanely annoying due to feeling totally misguided in how they approach the comedic aspects of the games. Thankfully Franken is a game that avoids a lot of this with the way it’s another of those games that feels as if any fun its poking is entirely in good spirits and from a position of pure admiration from the art. It also helps that the game is only an hour long to make sure it never really outstays its welcome, keeping the jokes about silly aspects of JRPGs present in a way that consistently still feels fun to play through and having some jokes that honestly feel pretty funny and original. The 4th wall breaks are also kept to a minimum, thank god. Just a really fun time that ends on a high note with some of the dumbest and greatest “plot twists” possible, would recommend it especially if you’re into old school JRPGs like the original Dragon Quest and this style of quirkier game.

FFX/X-2 HD Remaster is a good remaster. Streamlines menus, upgraded visuals and music, and a few bonuses thrown in. I’ll be honest though, I only played X for the first few years of having this collection. That game is one of the highlights of the series easily, because of the story, the (beautifully done) romance, and the monumental shift it represented for the series, going into 3D. It holds up remarkably well despite being over twenty years old and has aged gracefully. The battle system is very simple but it works well, settling into a robust turn based system that accommodates the new Aeon summoning system nicely. The Sphere Grid mechanic is really fun, though tedious and contrived sometimes with the locks. Playing it on Switch meant there were a few game cheats that couldn’t be used, like skippable cutscenes, et cetera. Apart from that the only gripe I have with FFX HD is that you have to have a party member deal damage to an enemy for them to get experience. Meaning when grinding I have to swap out each one to deal damage. Fantastic game and an easy recommend to any FF-fanatic.

FFX-2 is an unorthodox sequel by comparison but worth it all the same. I loved seeing the evolution of Spira after two years, torn between a new world and pure anarchy, taking a pop concert type approach with the music. The story went to some interesting places and the gameplay was engaging enough, with some good performances from Tara Strong in particular as Rikku.

What a huge waste of time. For the player. For the devs. For the artists who designed the assets that make the world feel alive and detailed. What was the point of any of it? Why did they do all of this work, just to make a pretty mediocre easy-mode adventure game? It's frustrating. Couldn't they have worked on a nice little short film instead? Compete with Pixar for once? There's a ton of high quality stuff here! Stray tells a nice story about a lost cat and its adventures in a robot world; you go off and do favors for people as you find your footing, gaining a robot companion named B-12 along the way. The whole time I played it I was annoyed that there was not a jump button.

The lost cat, having slipped away from its companions and down into a dank, mysterious, walled city, has the obvious goal of getting out, of going "Outside." See there's a group of robots in that city known as "The Outsiders," the cat allies with these Outsiders and works in concert with them to develop the technology to get Out. Along the way you learn a little bit about the world you've found yourself in. There are comical story beats where your cat-activity of scratching up the furniture uncovers a secret, that kind of thing. The cat, though a little uncanny (I played on PS4), is convincingly charming if you're a sucker for that kind of stuff. It'll curl up into a ball at some spots, especially one, and you can see they're trying to go for the internet cat love thing. And it's well done, they deserve it.

But so why a video game? You don't need this to be a video game to get all of that. There's some stuff I haven't mentioned--Zergs, a jail segment, some minor stealth elements--that benefit a bit from the videogame format. There's a tension you just can't get to from a movie. But everything else, the world navigation, the "platforming," it is so easy it may as well play itself. This game is functionally a walking simulator, except instead of walking as a person you walk as a cat. Now walking simulators are not bad in and of themselves, I like quite a few of them myself, but realizing you're playing one when you wanted a platformer is disappointing. And even moreso, realizing how much the game would rock as a platformer dissapoints even harder. A lot of the game's navigation is about jumping on stuff, but you can only jump on stuff once there's a button prompt. This creates a disconnect--in a traditional platformer you'll learn your jump range, how high you can go, movement tricks--in this one there's nothing to learn, just look at where the green circle appears.

Does that kind of strict control sound cat-like? What do you know about cats. What are the like, known, essential traits of cats. Cats are known as being fickle or stubborn, they don't often do what you'd like them to do. They're agile, and fast, though occasionally goofy. The internet thinks they're adorable and is obsessed with 'em. They're great subjects for platformers, although it hasn't been done as often as you'd think. Good platformers enable quick, agile movement, and cats are--to some degree--thought of as being quick and agile. Super Mario 3D World and Rain World are probably the biggest examples of cat-based video gaming, the latter featuring a "slugcat" with really tight platforming. Rain World really immerses you in the feeling of being a slugcat. The controls are tight and difficult, and you look dumb when you mess up. The world is mean and unfair, and you feel on a deep level where you are on the food chain. It's might not be fair to compare Rain World and Stray too closely, they're clearly going for different things.

But both games decided to make the focus of their game a cat. A slugcat, in one, sure, but the choice of subject is interesting here. There is a sharp difference in approach and intention. Rain World wanted to put you in the shoes of the slugcat, to set up through its mechanics a kind of grammar to navigate its world. It's a simulator, to some degree. Though, it's worth pointing out that Rain World can be prohibitively difficult, to its detriment, and that Stray kind of exists at the other end of a spectrum here; Stray can be annoyingly easy, to its detriment.

That is all to say that Stray is not a simulator. Stray tells you a story and puts you on an audiovisual adventure. It's gorgeous, and kind of fun, and even has a little gameplay here and there. But on a mechanical level its boring, and maybe even a little lazy sometimes. And it's dumb to focus a "talk to guy do favor for him" game on a cat. People will play this game because its a cat doing cat stuff, and shit brother that's why I played it too. But on the whole. Eh.

Liked the style a surprising amount, especially the saturday morning cartoon styled cutscenes. The levels design is mostly pretty nice and I liked the way the hubs for each world were a level themselves and enjoyed the quick pace of the mostly short levels. The main problem here is the controls, and they're just awful. Really floaty jumps and maybe the worst double jump ever made, you slide off the edges of platforms all the time, and there's about a dozen different actions tied to the circle button, which you basically have to mash whenever you're near an interactable object to make sure it doesn't just ignore your input and kill you, but this also sometimes makes you snap to the wrong thing. This is all exacerbated by dying in one hit, and an obnoxious lives system. Still had enough fun to finish it, and it's a pretty quick game, but there's a lot here that I hope the sequels fix.

I'm gonna be blunt here: I don't think Fable is particularly good, but that doesn't mean it's worthless. Peter Molyneux has a lot of ideas, as we all know, and that sort of resulted in this development crunch where the dev team scrambled to try and implement all these different ideas and concepts into the original game according to his vision. Naturally, that means that most of the actual meat of the game is spread quite thin and exists, but not much more; the combat devolves into mashing X until they block, in which case you mash B, there's some kind of morality system but I don't think it actually matters until characters begin to take some kind of notice near the end of the game, and you can buy a house and sleep with people I guess but I never really saw any value in that unfortunately.

What Fable is good at doing is becoming this janky sandbox that's a ton of fun to break at every corner. For example, you can buy 154 apples from the first shopkeeper and then sell them back to him to profit because the price of buying/selling all depends on his current inventory (i.e. the shopkeeper has no apples after you buy them all, so they must be worth more selling to him); that's right, you can literally make untold millions just selling apples and meat from the first shopkeeper in the game with a net exchange of zero, and not only destroy the foundation of the entire market system, but also buy the most powerful armor in the game within the first hour. The magic system is also absurdly busted; spamming multihit arrow/sword spells makes your already pretty simple combat skills significantly overpowered, and the Slow Time skill just lets you hack away at enemies to your own leisure while they are forever trapped in the eternal limbo of hitstun. Oh, and there's a cave pretty early on that you can farm to raise your experience multiplier that keeps going up as long as you keep whacking enemies and don't get hit. Fun fact: since the experience multiplier also affects experience potions, you can consume an experience potion as soon as you have a multiplier of 20x and gain like 8000 XP in one go to become even more absurdly stat-buffed in the early game.

What I'm trying to say is, if Peter Molyneux's vision of Fable was to create this open universe where anything is possible, then he actually kind of succeeded, albeit in all the "wrong" ways. The story's inconsequential for the most part and I never really cared about what was going on (nor bothered to read the texts provided to me in the middle of the game that are the only source of lore/continuity actually) and the characters may as well just be generic Morrowind NPCs for all I know. And obviously the game has many issues being a product of its era, amongst other things. But Fable is not devoid of value because it is a ton of fun exploiting this game at every corner to do unintentional and dumb things and fortunately never takes itself too seriously. Maybe it's not a game I would necessarily recommend first or in earnest, but if you're looking for a few hours of sloppy yet enthralling entertainment from busting open the berth of bork 2000s games, then I think you'll find something very special here.

+combat is so so cool. sora can finally pull off crazy stunts even without the high-level abilities
+presentation overall has taken a big step up from kh1. a good demonstration of how far games came in the ps2 generation
+gummi missions are way cooler and less boring (tho I certainly can't be bothered to replay them)
+timeless river (the classic cartoon world) owns. port royal and space paranoids are inspired picks as well
+the bosses have taken a big leap forward in both creativity and complexity. a nice 50-50 split between gimmicky minigame bosses and more taxing bosses that require studying patterns and timing attacks
+the payoff is rewarding for those who have kept up with the story
+drive forms let sora go completely nuts for a little bit, especially in master and final forms towards the end of the game
+major increase in the amount of abilities, summons, limits, etc. to provide options in combat
+disney worlds are so much easier to navigate than in the first game
+overall difficulty is scaled much better this time around (sans a certain FM endgame addition that was rather annoying)

-the story is poorly paced. there's three big plot dumps in the beginning, midpoint, and end, with about 20 hours of fluff between it all
-disney worlds have little to do with the plot, and many of them have a mandatory second episode. this is probably the biggest hurdle in the game. these worlds wear out their welcome so fast
-mobility techniques are locked behind leveling up each drive form, which is an extremely arduous task even with exploits
-much of the post-game content is tied to the mobility tech I just mentioned. again, grinding the drive forms is boring
-the story must have been incomprehensible at launch. 358/2 days clears it up quite a bit, but this game really fails to explain what is going on at several key points

overall enjoyment is going to depend on how much you can stomach the second run of each world + the plot dumps. I could't put this game down for the first half, and then had to push myself to clean up all of the second runs and finish it off. thankfully there's enough enjoyment to be had in watching sora flip all over the place to warrant making it to the final credits.