I had never played a gacha game before Nier Reincarnation, and I likely won't play one again - my experience with this thing, which I'm reluctant to even call a game, exists as a weird peek into a world I willfully don't understand and hopefully never will unless a couple of things go REALLY wrong in my life. I dropped back into Reincarnation after hearing it was being shut down, and they were giving you everything you needed to make it to the end of the story for free. I had an almost allergic reaction to it the first time I played, but I was grimly fascinated in what a game like this looks like in its dying days.

I really like Nier. I like its characters, its music, its strange approach to game genre, the measured barren minimalism of its 3d spaces - Nier Reincarnation takes all of the things I like about Nier and uses them in service of what amounts to a slot machine for perverts. The way in which Reincarnation wears the glamour of something loved and familiar in service of what's essentially gambling is almost grotesque - like a child snatched by a changeling, a monster wearing their skin.

If you're new to gacha games like I was, all the things the game does in service to cultivating a long term audience of whales seem completely insane. There is a colossal amount of math happening at all times, all in service of nothing - numbers get into the hundreds of thousands, yet the game must be frictionless enough at all times to be played via automation. Each story chapter consists of ten battles, but the game gives you the means to skip up to 100 encounters a day for free. There are fourteen discrete categories of upgrade material. The most expensive premium currency package on the in-game store was 150 dollars. To look into this game's community, a relatively small one by the standards of these kinds of games, is like looking into a parallel dimension where value is completely decoupled from time and reality. Upgrade mats, grinding for bookmarks, pity pulls - none of these words are in the Bible. There's a dark engine at the heart of Reincarnation, of almost genius construction, and its sole function is to obfuscate the fact there's absolutely nothing here. The game plays itself, and gives you tools to skip the playing. Nier Reincarnation is not a video game - it is a magician waving their hand while the other sneaks into your pocket.

There is, despite everything, something interesting and almost compelling inside Nier Reincarnation, separate from grim academic fascination with its genre - the art direction, soundtrack, sound design, and voice acting are all beautiful, better than any of this deserves. The writing, which takes the possible funniest parts of Nier - the pointlessly tragic weapon stories - and places them center stage, is mostly really dumb! In one of my favourite stories, a young soldier hunts down the guy who killed his parents, only to find out that the murderer was his biological dad and he'd been cradle snatched as a baby. The little girl who's ostensibly the main character of the story is part of an invented caste of peasants called "goat people". A son tries to kill himself to give his mother his heart for a transplant, yet she dies before he can bring himself to do it. I still mostly liked the pulpy melodrama, and the direction they go in this last chapter - finally linking Reincarnation to the previous two games in a meaningful way - is pretty cool! There's a lot of talent on display here, and in another version of reality present in The Cage, all these clearly very skilled people got to make a real video game instead.

At the end of the game they put up a "THANK YOU FOR PLAYING" screen and then change it to "THANK YOU FOR PRAYING". What the fuck is that, that's nothing

I don’t know if this is the best version of Final Fantasy VII, but it certainly is the most!

Where Remake strove to create a focused and authentic sense of place with its reimagining of Midgar, Rebirth feels like it’s shooting to recreate a different part of what defines a PSX era Final Fantasy - this has the original game’s tonal mania, a billion exhaustively realised minigames of varying quality, and a bunch of busy mechanics with intended and unintended interactions capable of breaking the whole game wide open.

Rebirth builds upon and improves all the things I liked about Remake, while also introducing a glut of new wrinkles and mechanics that turn a relatively streamlined action RPG into a Xenoblade enjoyer’s delight - with all the baggage that brings with it. The sidequests are so much better than they were in the previous game,but the open world activities are mostly pretty bad! The overworld is otherwise really compelling in its own right, and didn’t need a bunch of extraneous shit added to it to justify its existence - the Ubisoft style towers that mark all points of interest are particularly egregious when every activity in the open world already has a visual cue that guides you to it. If they’d taken out maybe half of the open world content and made an effort to make the stuff that remained feel a bit more unique from region to region, they could have had something pretty special - but the checklist of activities across the map doesn’t really interact with any of the stuff in the game that’s actually good. I still found myself doing heaps of Chadley’s bullshit despite thinking most of it sucked, because I do really enjoy the act of just hanging out in this setting and spending time with the core cast of characters - which proves that the structure of the quests is at least tolerable, or that with enough charisma I can be tricked into engaging with pretty much any old slop.

The actual beats of Rebirth’s plot are just as tenuously strung together as this stretch of the original game - with often very little reason given for the characters to be travelling from one place to the next - but the way the the cast are brought to life is so loving and detailed that you find yourself excusing every leap they make to get to where the story demands. Rebirth understands that we’re here because we love these guys, and every moment that’s in service of putting these characters through the wringer or bringing them closer together is like magic. There are maybe too many buds towards the end of the game for them to juggle elegantly with the same grace as the playable cast, but this is at its core a game about hanging out with people you already like, and it succeeds way more often than it stumbles.

The last few hours of the game are completely deranged - the landing is loud, messy, and both deliberately and unintentionally struggles for cohesion. The story feels the absence of its own conclusion more keenly than its predecessor, and I’m left wondering once again as the credits roll if any of the new metatextual plot elements are additive, or only serve to muddy the strong emotional beats of the source material.

At multiple times during my playthrough i yelled “fuck yes!” and at others I groaned “this sucks!” which is about as Final Fantasy VII as you could ask for!

Bow wow wow

I hope you're ready to talk about this game for the next ten years

i wish i could eternal sunshine myself to experience the first fifty hours again because they were absolutely sublime, but elden ring is at once the most accessible modern fromsoft rpg and a caricature of all the criticisms of the developer by people who have never played one of their games - the endgame content felt less forgiving than even dark souls 3 at its meanest, and depending on the exact variety of brainworms that you've got, this is a great thing or a terrible thing

maybe one of the most magical games i've ever experienced, but by the end I was on my hands and knees begging for it to be over so I could think about anything else

in short, bloodborne's still the king let's go baby

Much like the first game, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 attempts to be every JRPG ever made all at once, and suffers for its lack of focus and mechanical chaff - but for all the game’s stumbles and overreach, I can’t help but get giddily into all its overcooked systems and anime melodrama. The game is stupidly ambitious and committed to being exactly what it is with no compromises. It’s totally batshit, a messy and unwieldy thing that resists any attempt to engage with it like a normal game, and I’m super glad it was made!

The next one needs to be like 30% less horny so I can play it on my TV