This game is a mess, which isn’t surprising considering how its development went. That doesn’t make it bad per say, but it’s definitely not as good as it could have been and even makes it frustrating in some ways.

As far as gameplay goes, Final Fantasy XV is one of the most bland game i can think of. The combat isn’t terrible per say, but it just feels so boring. Attacking is done by holding a button (you can mash it instead i don’t know if it really makes a difference tho) and you have a few different moves depending on which direction you hold your stick in but at its core it just boils down to one simple act: holding a button, there’s no timing required, and the closest thing there is to combo would be that if you’re close to an ally/behind the enemy you have a chance to unleash a move with them. Dodging works very much the same, you just hold the block button. That’s it, no timing. Unless the attack is an AoE or there’s just a lot of attacks coming from every way at once just holding a button means you’ll dodge everything. Sure there are warp strikes and different weapon kinds with different movesets etc but at its core the combat is just very weak, and it’s made worse by how easy that game is. Unless you forcefully restrain yourself, dying is quite virtually impossible because once you die you can just use a phoenix down on yourself so unless you decide to use no items you really need to try hard to die. It’s also very easy to get overleveled: since the game is an open world with a lot of sidequests and hunts, if you’re like me and decide to do virtually every single one of them you come across you’ll end up way way way overlevel, for reference i finished chapter 3 after 27 hours and at level 46 while the recommended level is like 15 or something like that.

The pacing of the game is also extremely fucked up, the end of chapter 9 marks a big turn in the game tone which i’m totally not against but… I think the way everything from this point on goes so fast goes against it by not letting you process what’s happening. Sure, i did spend way too much time doing all the sidequest before that, but even then the last 5 chapters with the exception of the last one are all in a straight line, there’s no longer any open world to explore (you can technically go back to it but there’s nothing new there so if you’ve already done everything it’s kinda useless) and except for the much dreaded chapter 13, everything goes extremely fast, you don’t really have the time to catch a breather and think about what just happened. Some might say it helps show how fucked up everything is going since neither you the player nor the characters get time to breathe, but i personally think it’d have been better to let you spend more time in those parts of the game. The ending at least was extremely good, i just feel like everything leading to it was too rushed.

The story itself is also kinda eh for me. The main characters are really good, i love the bros and their bonds between each other, and Aldyn is a funny villain (he wears a fedora). But i find the plot simply not that engaging, which is something i’m totally ok with for once because of how strong the roadtrip feeling is (this game really is about the journey) and the ending also being very good. However i really hate how parts of the story is split outside of the main game: movie (which sucks), anime (which is decent with episode 2 being really really good), DLCs, books… Like i get this game got a fucked up development cycle but come on

Another point i’m really extremely underwhelmed about is the music. Final Fantasy has always been a series with OSTs of top tier quality, and this game’s ost is… Weird? First of all, it feels like they forgot to actually use it in the game, i learned there’s supposed to be an overworld theme AFTER beating the game because it takes so long to start you’ll likely never hear it because you’ll get into a fight before that, and it also doesn’t play if you’re on a chocobo or in the car which is how you’ll spend most of the time moving around. The car also doesn’t have any theme, you just either play the radio (which is old FF games song and a few ones from the DLCs/movies) or listen to nothing. Having listened to the full ost outside of the game, some of the tracks are really strong (somnus, Valse di Fantastica, the battle themes…) but a lot of them are also just ok or like.. They’re more like a movie score, like they’re not the kind of songs i’d listen to on a regular basis and i feel like they lack identity. The good songs are really good as expected from the series, but i just feel like overall that OST is pretty disappointing by being filled with a bunch of just eh songs, and due to how poorly implemented in the game it was.


Overall, FF15 is for me a pretty weird game. It’s not bad, but it’s not great either, and a lot of it is just very frustrating like you have to play a dlc released 3 years after the game to have the villain’s backstory/motivation which sounds insane to me like i’m totally fine with some things in games not being explained but in this case it’s not “not explained because they wanted to have it be a mystery up to everyone’s interpretation” it’s just not explained because they didn’t have the time to put it into the game. As I said above, this game is a big mess in a way that’s pretty frustrating, but honestly considering the development cycle it’s kinda a miracle that despite everything it’s still a decent experience

it's definitely an improvement over the psp game except for the voice acting (i literally switched to japanese because of how much i dislike zack's new VA compared to the og) and like the music where they like remade some songs but like a lot are still the same as on the psp so why would you do this and i also think for most of the different songs the OG ones were just better lol
the story is unchanged and i'm very biased towards it because it was my first FF game (don't do like me don't play this game before FF7 it's a mistake bc it spoils some extremely big stuff from FF7) and even like my first game with an actual story that i can think of. replaying it now after so much time and more knowledge of the FF7 universe (i did replay it one time after beating FF7 but that also was years ago) i still extremely like it, zack is just such a cool character. there are definitely some issues with it (mostly genesis related) and replaying it now i can definitely see the psp pacing (like it's way shorter than i remembered it) but unless you're a guy who doesn't like FF7's story being messed it's enjoyable especially if you enjoy how fucking stupid some of it can be
the gameplay is the big improvement the game got, combat doesn't suck anymore because it's not as stiff, the DMW doesn't interrupt you mid fight, you can even skip the cutscenes for it and choose not to use the limit breaks, it's definitely not as fun as FF7R but it's not bad either, it's good enough but with if you like being broken there's a lot of option to do so. The game itself is fairly short tho 100% all the missions takes time cause there's 300 of them, it's a bit of a tedious process at times but i like part of it because tackling on hard missions where you get killed in one hit bc you're not supposed to do them now is a thing you can do, which i did, and i personally think it's fun. The superboss is legit impossible on hard mode tho that's funny (there's an undodgeable attack that deals 99999dmg even with maxxed out defense and removes your phoenix down) getting 100% DMW sucks tho it's legit just RNG lmfao

Good concept, but i feel like it's too easy to find a build you just vibe with and never have to change your mech afterwards which is kinda weird (i basically didn't change anything about my build around halfway through the game) and seems like it goes against the idea behind the game. The controls suck but once you get used to them it's like passable, it's not good but it's playable

Also that last level was fucking horrendous it's genuinely one of the worst thing i've played through the game loses half a star just for it

The core concept is cool (i mean, this is superhot, but in VR), but the actual game is too frustrating: throwing doesn't work half the time, which is a big problem when most of the later levels revolve as much if not more into throwing stuff rather than firing. there's no way to move around with the controller, meaning that if like me, you play in a small area, it's sometimes very frustrating to have to wait for an enemy to come closer to you because you're out of stuff to throw or fire (i don't think having to do a silly little dance because there's nothing else you can do to progress is really fun), and trust me considering how easy it is to miss a throw it will happen to you quite often. The checkpoint system is also really annoying, having to redo the same levels because you died on the 4th one is really annoying, a easy mode option to have a checkpoint after each level would have been welcomed. When the game feels good it's awesome, but i ended up being frustrated way more often than that,

Going into this game i wasn’t sure if i was gonna like it, since i never really played a SRPG (i played a bit of FE7 and some Advance Wars but that’s kinda it), and holy fuck was i wrong this game is awesome

I’ll start by saying i technically didn’t play this version of the game, but instead I played The Lion War of the Lions, which is a romhack of the original Final Fantasy Tactics that brings almost all the WOTL content to it (i think onion knight isn’t in it) and even made the multiplayer only rendez-vous playable in single player. I went for that romhack instead of the psp game because i know that while the slowdown can be patched, the audio quality can’t and i’d honestly recommend playing this hack instead of the psp port unless you really want to play it on a real PSP/Vita or plan to use one of the few elements they didn’t bring over

As i said above, i wasn’t sure if i was gonna like this game at first, and yet it ended up being one of my favorite game of the series, and unless we count spin-offs, it even is the one i’d say has the best gameplay. I’m obviously not an expert in the SRPG genre, but the way FFT approaches some of its mechanics in a different way than other series (at least Fire Emblem which is like the series i associate with the genre, even if i’m aware most other games probably differ from it a lot) really made me love it a lot. This game is extremely similar to Final Fantasy V (which might have one of the best gameplay of the turn based FF), but as a SRPG. Every character starts with a couple jobs unlocked, and performing actions as a job nets you EXP (which increase your overall level) and JP, for job points, which increases your job level. Each job comes with different abilities to unlock, divided in multiple categories depending on what they do : active abilities have their own category, and then you have one for movement, one for support abilities etc. Each unit, no matter its current job, can equip one of each kind of abilities from any job, just like in FF5, so for example you can have a thief that has black magic as a secondary ability and also has a passive ability that lets him equip swords. This system works extremely well, because it allows you to really build your team the way you want it. Each job has its strength and weaknesses, it’s far from being well balanced (monk is by far the most busted physical job, especially if you grind for dual wield) but it just works so well, coming up with ways to make your team really good is just so fun. Some story characters even come with their own special jobs, and those are really good, shoutouts to holy knight it’s just so good. The game has most of the classic FF jobs with a few exceptions like red mage, and even has some unique jobs, like mimic, orator or one of my favorite job, arithmetician

The game also approaches dying in a really unique and awesome way. When a unit dies (this applies to both allies and enemies), they don’t immediately disappear. Instead, for three turns, you won’t be stay on the tile they’re on, but you’ll have the ability to bring them back to life, using a raise spell or a phoenix down. If you don’t, the unit will disappear, leaving behind either a crystal (that heals you or sometimes lets you learn one ability if you stop on it) or a chest, and if it’s one of your unit, there’s permadeath so it’s goodbye forever. This approach to dying is so cool because it allows for a lot of strategy: if someone dies, it’s no big deal, you can bring them back! I know that depending on the game permadeath isn’t always that punitive because you’ll always get more units later on, but in FFT, since you build your units the way you want, losing them would be much of a pain considering there’s some grind involved (i ended up never losing a single unit permanently, and used the same 3 units + story related characters for the entire game and i think most people play that way too)

Spell casting is also awesome in this game. With a few exceptions, each spell will be cast in a cross shape around the tile/unit you’re targeting (for each spell you can decide to cast it on a tile or a unit, meaning if the unit moves your spell will still target them). Spells don’t cast as soon as they’re used tho, they all have a different cast speed which mean they’ll be cast after X units take a turn (you can even see who is gonna take a turn before you cast the spell, to know if it’s worth using it!) This can lead to really cool strategies too, like targeting one of your unit with a healing/buff spell and moving it next to another one of your unit to have the spell target them both, or even moving next to an enemy unit with one of yours that’s being targeted with an offensive spell to have the spell hurt both your unit and theirs. Some abilities other than spellcasting also have delay like jump for dragoons or aiming for archers, and i think this aspect of the game opens up for a lot of strategy, it’s really cool.

And on top of the combat system being amazing, the story is also really really good. It starts off a bit confusing since yknow, it’s a story involving a lot of factions in a war so there’s a lot of characters that are named and you have to remember them all, who they’re allied to and oh shit count bingus actually betrayed duke floppa so actually the relationship between their faction has changed, there’s a lot to take in but once you get past the first few hours and understand who’s who, it gets really good. Ramza is a really good protagonist, and Delita is one of the coolest mfer from the entire series. The game also has a lot of really awesome quotes, those dudes keep spitting fire at each other before, during and after battles.

The game starts off really challenging, and with a lot of difficulty spikes every now and then (you better make those backup save files), with the ending of chapter 3 being the big one a lot of people know about because if you don’t make a backup, chances are you’re gonna have to reset your game. Once you get past it tho, the final chapter is pretty easy, even the optional dungeon with the superboss in it isn’t that hard. The difficulty of the game is awesome tho, it’s challenging but not in a bullshit way and getting past those hard battles is so satisfying, and grinding isn’t even that bad since battles are more involved than in a turn based game.

Final Fantasy Tactics is a really awesome game, one that’s being slept on by way too many FF fans, either because it’s not a numbered game, or because it’s a strategy game. Almost everyone who played it will agree that it’s one of the best tho, and for a good reason: once you get into it, it’s one of the most fun and rewarding game of the entire series, backed up by some extremely extremely cool characters and settings.

Vagrant Story is a game that had the potential to being one of the best game i’ve ever played, but missed the mark and ended up being a good, tho extremely frustrating experience.

In Vagrant Story, the player controls Ashley Riot, a special agent of the Valendia Knights, whose mission is to save the family of Duke Bardorba, that has been attacked by a cult. The mission fails however, and Sydney (the leader of the cult) and his right hand man escape to the ghost city of Lea Monde with the duke’s son taken hostage, so Ashley is now tasked to follow them and to rescue the hostage and kill the cultists.

Vagrant Story’s story (heh) is told in a really cool way, that really makes it stand out for a PS1 game. The game’s cutscenes are all in engine, and there’s clearly a ton of work put in them: from the camera work to the lighting, they’re some of the best directed cutscenes i’ve seen from a PS1 game, beating even MGS imo. The story itself is also really solid, and told in a way I really love: there’s a lot of points that are unanswered, but in a way that definitely feels like it’s on purpose, that the dev wanted you to fill in the blank yourself.

Visually speaking, the game is definitely the most impressive PS1 game i’ve ever seen. The character models are on a visual level that clearly feels like it’s pushing the console’s limit, they all have actual faces that are more than just one texture of a face you’ll usually see in PS1 game. The game environments are a mixed bag tho: the actual city of Lea Monde has a really great atmosphere, but a lot of the game also takes place in mines that are just kinda boring to look at.

However, even the blandest looking parts of the game manages to pull off a really incredible atmosphere, thanks to the amazing sound design and music. This game honestly reminds me a lot of Demon’s Souls or Dark Souls 1, in terms of atmosphere. You’re just wandering alone in some medieval inspired dead city, fighting enemies while trying to piece together the few bits of story/lore you received, and everything is improved by the art direction/sound design, it’s an eerily beautiful game world to get lost into.

Speaking of getting lost, that’s something that’s likely gonna happen a lot if you don’t follow a guide. I did follow one so it never happened to me, but often times you have to do huge detour to get a key, and by the time you found whatever item you needed you may have likely forgot where you had to use it (tho the map shows you which key is required for each locked door so it’s not impossible to find your way back). The game rarely if ever gives you any indication on where to go either: it’s up to you to explore, and while i didn’t do it i think it’s neat!

There’s however a big reason that forced me to use a guide and skip over all the exploration: the combat. Combat in this game is extremely complex, and not at all explained in game, like sure there are in game tutorials but you don’t play through them and they’re just not fun to read (and apparently even contain mistakes), so it’s just easier to read up stuff online. There are a lot of different mechanics that come into the combat: 3 different kind of affinities to calculate damage/defense, equipment crafting, 2 different kind of weapon durability, etc… There’s quite a lot to take in. In theory, the combat system is interesting: everyone has different body parts, you choose which one to target, depending on the one you chose you have a higher/lower percentage of getting a hit in with a higher/lower damage value.

But that’s in theory. In practice, the game is extremely tedious to play, because you’ll have to do a lot, a LOT, of pretty slow menuing. You very often have to change weapons, because of the aforementioned affinities, and there’s no quick way to do this, i’d say each weapon switch takes around 15 seconds which is a lot when you have to do it almost every fights. And sometimes, even your best weapons aren’t enough because you don’t have the right affinity on them, so you end up doing pathetic damages to enemies and fights can often drag on for multiple minutes. That really tedious menuing, coupled with the fact you sometimes have no way to do good damage, made me give up and look up a guide.

The game’s difficulty is all over the place. As i said, sometimes you don’t have any way to do good damage due to affinities, but after a certain point in the game everything becomes kinda easy (tho still painfully slow) because you can give yourself most affinities so it’s extremely rare to not be able to do damage. You’re also in theory immortal, as long as you’re good. During attacks, if you time your button press correctly, you can chain different skills to keep attacking, and the same applies to when you’re attacked, if you press a button at the right moment you can use a defensive skill, and two of them literally make you regenerate health even if you go under 0 HP, meaning if you can time them, you can’t die.

Vagrant Story is a game that has the status of hit classic (heck, it’s the third game ever to have received a perfect Famitsu score, which i don’t think really matters that much but it definitely shows how well received the game was), and i can definitely see why. It’s sometimes extremely frustrating, but the gorgeous visuals and the atmosphere more than make up for it, and while it didn’t apply to the way i played it, beating it with minimal guidance must be something extremely rewarding. It’s definitely a game well worth playing, despite how tedious it can be

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is a game that took drastic changes from the original Final Fantasy Tactics, but I think almost all of those changes made it a worse game than its predecessor.

There’s a couple good changes in the game, don’t get me wrong: you can finally cancel movement meaning that if you realize that moving to a tile isn’t enough to get in range to attack you can just cancel that and move somewhere else, which is the big QoL feature i wanted the most. Random encounters now appear on the map, which is cool! The game also feels like it was made with the GBA in mind: you’ve got a lot of missions (300), and they feel more compact, more designed around a mentality of being quick pick and play missions, which is fitting for a GBA game. The game’s tone is also way more lighthearted than FFT, which again feels more fitting for a GBA game.

Sadly, the story is not great at all. You play as Marche, a young kid who gets teleported in a magical world full of Final Fantasy inspired imagery, along with some of your friends (tho you’re separated from them), and your goal is to find a way back to the real world. A pretty standard isekai scenario, but none of the characters are really good. For example there’s one of your friend whose entire character arc is “i don’t want to go back to the real world because my hair in white in it and i have to dye it red every day”. There’s nothing really interesting or innovative in the story, and i don’t really care for it’s message on escapism which doesn’t even fit with the narrative that much imo.

And the gameplay is a big, huge, massive step back from FFT imo. None of the maps are really that interesting or memorable. The game UI is atrocious, there’s no button to automatically equip your best equipment, i don’t even think there’s a sort button either, seeing if an item is better than what you have equipped is so unintuitive it took me 10 hours to figure out it was a feature, there’s a lot of issues with the menuing in this game and none of it is due to the lack of buttons the GBA has.

Abilities have been reworked too: instead of spending JP to learn an ability of your choice, you learn them from your equipment, like in FF9. This system is awful. It makes sense in FF9 because each character has a specific class (Zidane is a thief, Steiner is a knight, etc..) so this system allows you to build their specific class as you wanted. In FFTA everyone can change job between fights, so it makes no sense. Worse even, some of the best abilities are locked behind equipment you can’t find without following a guide because you need to steal them (which requires getting the right stealing ability) or do specific missions or w/e to find them. I didn’t follow a guide, so i ended up only having the most basic of abilities which sucked.

The game is also very grind heavy. Unlike in FFTA, there’s no level scaling for enemies, and only doing the story missions with a few side ones here and there won’t be enough to have a good enough team for the endgame. I had to grind around 10 levels for it (which isn’t even hard, just boring), and even then the final boss had an attack targeting my entire team that one shot almost everyone.

Overall, this game isn’t really bad, it’s just very forgettable, and a lot of its design wasn’t enjoyable to me, especially coming from FFT. If you enjoy it at least there’s a lot of content in it, but for me, it’s just a disappointing “sequel” to an excellent game

I’m absolutely not interested in farm sims in the first place (and from what i’ve been told none really compare to RF4) but holy shit does this one manage to just fit everything together in a way that gets me invested in it. There’s a shit ton of mechanics and not only are they pretty good individually, but they all interact with each other in a way that flows so naturally and makes them even better. RF4 lets you live in a small town with a bit more than 20 other characters, and (except for 2 of them that are cameo characters from previous games and have way less dialogue than the others) they’re all really cool and feel like actual characters. In my 46 hours of playtime, i don’t think i saw a single line of dialogue being repeated. And i know you could spend more time in the game and it’ll still be like that, even if you go above 100s of gameplay you’ll still find new lines, new events, it’s crazy. Not only are the characters all cool, but they also interact with each others which apparently isn’t something other games in the genre have and it’s so crazy?? Like you could just go out and see people talking to each other, sometimes it’s just visual (like they’re next to each other and have emotes above their head to show they’re talking), sometimes you get actual conversations between them. The MC is also pretty cool, they’re not a silent character and it’s for the best because i don’t like silent characters to begin with, you still get some freedom in what you say but they also have a personality behind that which i like.
You can take characters with you in dungeons, and the combat in this game is pretty cool too! There’s multiple types of weapons (swords, spears, fists, magic etc..), all with different moves, and the equipment system is pretty neat. You can unlock new crafting recipes by leveling up your crafting level (which is something you do by crafting), this gives the game a real sense of progression since sometimes you’ll unlock weapons you can’t craft because they require components you don’t have access to yet. But on top of that you can upgrade your weapons, and there’s a lot of different materials that’ll give you different effects: more damage, poison attacks, paralysis attacks, etc… there’s a lot of options to choose from.
And last but not least, the farming aspect is really cool too. You start off with only one type of crop, but quickly unlock more. The entire system is pretty simple, you plant your seed, water it every day, and after X days you get veggies from it. But where it gets really interesting is how deep it can get, without ever forcing the player to invest themselves too much into it if they don’t wish to. You can level up your seeds level to yield better veggies, there are items you can buy or craft to make them grow faster, there’s soil quality that can make a seed yield more or less veggies, you can even make GIANT veggies… And all of that is optional, you can also just simply plant seeds and wait if you don’t want to bother.
And in my opinion that’s why RF4 shines so much. It’s a game that understands that not everyone wants to have the same experience nor investment in it, so everything in this game feels like it’s been made to be there if you want to interact with it but also you can just ignore it, and it ends up making a game that feels like everyone will have a unique experience. Nobody will take care of their field the same way. The same applies for your equipment, there’s so many ways to customize! And let’s not even talk about the NPCs, there’s so many lines of dialogue, so many little things you’d have to really try hard to see everything. And on top of that, everything just mashes together in really cool ways: the story and characters are engaging so you want to see more, so you have to go do the dungeons, but then that forces you to make food and healing items so you have to farm, and dungeons reward you with better farming tools etc… There’s a lot of stuff i haven’t even seen (like i know there’s a fucking roguelike mode, i can get married and have kids, etc..) this game is just incredibly good and packed to the brim, and it’s a real shame it’s so not well known.

First shmup i've ever 1CC'd, and i think it's a really solid one.
The music's awesome (twice, because there's an alt version for every song in the game!), the game looks pretty good too, and i think the game does a really good way at easing shmup newcomers like myself into it. On normal mode, if you get hit while holding bombs, you will autobomb which is really really useful because that means even if you still struggle with timing your bombs to escape death, the game got you covered. You also need to try the game for a while to unlock continues, which i think is really smart, because that means you actually have to try the game before being able to simply use infinite credits to get to the end.

The scoring system is also pretty neat, forcing you to use your subweapon and be pretty aggressive to get more points (and, by extension, more lives), which imo also is good for a newcomer, at least having to be aggressive with the subweapon resonated with me.

On top of that you can try missions to familiarize yourself with the stages, or even play in stage select mode starting from the mini bosses or even bosses to learn their patterns, etc...

All those elements make the game a really good one to start shmups imo, and from what i heard even for shmup veterans the game is really solid on higher difficulties

As a huge fan of Xenogears and the Xenoblade Chronicles trilogy, I really wanted to enjoy this game, and while I'm sure my opinion of it/the Saga trilogy is likely gonna evolve over time, for now it's really hard for me to do so.

Xenosaga episode 1 is by far the most painfully slow turn based RPG i've ever played, in every aspect. Fights are LONG: even the shortest attack animation is probably like 2 or 3 seconds long, with your most powerful moves taking around probably 15 to 20 seconds per turn, and enemies attacks aren't any quicker than that. Combine that to the fact that a lot of enemies have high HP or defense, that you don't really get "fast" AOE moves until a good chunk of the game, or the fact that the combats get really repetitive soon and you've got a big snoozefest to play.

The weirdest part is how the game has "complex" mechanics on paper but is actually very simple? like you get 3 kinds of exp points, you've got to choose the attacks each character will use and they got like 3 different kinds of properties to level up, but all of that is pretty superficial in my opinion. All you'll do for most fights is press square and circle or triangle and circle every round, there's way less options than in Xenogears. The boost system is interesting on paper, but in practice i didn't even use it that often. And I almost forgot to mention you can switch to a mech because guess what: they're so useless i only used them like twice in the whole game.

The story is also extremely slow. Way too much for me to really have enjoyed it. There are a LOT of cutscenes, and while some of them are really cool, I feel like a lot of time i just didn’t get it. Obviously, the game was planned to be the first part of a series from the start, so i wasn’t expecting them to explain everything, but dear god there’s a lot they don’t explain at all. I’m not against having some mystery, but there’s a difference between a mystery where you’re given some answers (and more questions) as you go, Xenosaga doesn’t do that, it doesn’t really explain shit for a lot of topic and it really bothers me.

Pretty late into the game i realized/remembered there’s an ingame encyclopedia so i decided to check out entries related to a couple things and uh. There’s like 600 entries. While i think it’s cool to have an encyclopedia that complete, imo Xenosaga falls into the same issue as FFXIII: not giving you enough explanations in game, and forcing you to rely on reading the encyclopedia. I only read a couple entries but some of them also literally don’t really tell you shit except “you’ll find more about that in the next games…..”

I’m sure after going through the other games, or even just youtube videos explaining the lore/story i’ll have less issues with the game’s story, like there’s a lot i didn’t get but i know it’s intentional. (at least for some of it) But imo that’s a problem. Xenogears is cool because there’s a lot you won’t get by simply playing it once, but you still understand most of it. That’s not the case here, and while I get it’s because it was designed to give you answers later, it doesn’t give you enough immediately, or at least not in a clear enough way, to be satisfying, and imo it makes it really frustrating. Combine that to a really slow and boring combat system, and an atmosphere that feels nonexistent a lot of time (i know the lack of music can make for a great one, but that’s not the case here) and you end up with a really weird game. It’s hard to judge it entirely because it’s part of a series that was planned to be a series, but at the same time i don’t think knowing it’s gonna have a sequel is an excuse for not giving you enough.