so, big shocker here considering i log and review japanese role-playing games on the internet, i'm autistic. this is a facet of my life that i wasn't comfortable with for a long time; i remember as a child being confused about what my diagnosis meant, and i remember as a teenager denying my diagnosis. something most people with autism will say is that there's not a lot of art out there that really captures the experiences we have, which often makes it really difficult to compare for people. you're stuck with either comparing yourself to robotic characters, or cheap one dimensional versions of autism written by neurotypicals. while i was playing 358/2 days, all i could think of was that if i had played this when i was younger, it would have really stuck with me as a formative experience, and one that i could use as a point of comparison for how i feel.
roxas is a really odd protagonist; when we're first introduced to him, he can barely speak, and most concepts don't come naturally to him. he's a Nobody, a being that is missing a heart, and therefore isn't supposed to be capable of emotion. it's not that roxas is a husk or has no personality; he's just been stripped of anything resembling a self, and has no frame of reference for what that may be. what's beautiful about days' narrative, to me, is the way roxas' character writing closely resembles concepts like social masking, which were so integral to my life when i was younger. roxas does things because he knows they're expected of him to do. he doesn't understand what a friend is, but he sees how friends are supposed to act, and so that's how he acts. it's all learned behaviors with roxas, the things he thinks of naturally are things he's not "supposed" to. this is shown excellently with the ice cream motif, which stays consistent throughout nearly all the repetition in this game. i really can't believe that nomura is a talented enough character writer to make a bar of ice cream from disney sea into an effective metaphor for life.
358/2 in general touches very well on themes of authority figures defining identity; we see so frequently that roxas and xion are thrown aside or deemed failures for acting in ways that don't benefit the bottom line. their identity is trampled upon and diminished solely because their identity isn't convenient. these kids exist for no reason other than to work, and their job sure doesn't give a damn if they exist. dissociation is touched upon quite a lot as well; it's a very odd blend of stuff that occasionally borders on denpa with childhood melancholy that only KH is really capable of.
so after all that discussion on the story, how's the game? pretty bad! 358/2's comboing doesn't feel very good, the bosses are extremely slow, easy, and tanky, and magic trivializes most sections while also feeling like total shit to use. quite a fair amount of writing has been done about 358/2 as a game that's "bad on purpose", and i think that's giving it too much credit and not enough. the stuff that's bad about 358/2 days isn't the repetitive nature of the missions, nor is it even the trivial nature of many of the missions you receive. the problem is that everything takes way too long and the bosses especially are crazy timesinks. it's forgiveable because this is a game you play in 10-30 min intervals, but some parts of this game are up there as some of the most boring experiences i've ever had with a game. there is a case to make for some ludonarrative elements here, but it's pretty far from feeling intentional.

truly one of the best sequels ever made. kingdom hearts 2 improves massively on every aspect of it’s charming but flawed predecessor. at least on critical, the combat is polished to a sheen, with a really refreshing balance between straight-forward inputs and nuanced resource management. combos are dead simple, but kh2 isn’t really about combos in the first place. instead, the player is forced to consider their resources moment-to-moment, and how to get as much as they can out of everything. a lot of these battles are very tight squeezes (or at least they were for me, as i’m a bit inexperienced w action games), and it’s extremely satisfying to win because of a perfectly timed drive form or clever choice of summon. in this sense, i think KH2 gets a lot of mileage out of its fusion of character action and JRPG mechanics. it’s very approachable on a basic mechanical level, but still offers enough nuance to where players can feel confident that they truly learned a lot about the game’s inner workings over the course of their playthrough. a great rpg is balanced by the player’s knowledge of the game, and a great action game is balanced by the player’s muscle memory of the game, but despite these goals seeming completely adverse to each other, kh2 really manages to combine both into a package that i’m confident would please any fan of either genre. i’m not sure how true this would be on the other difficulties, since critical felt almost exactly perfectly balanced to me, but the good side of this is that the combat fundamentals in kh2 are enjoyable enough on their own that you could really just combo trash mobs for a few hours and have fun. there’s still some fights i think are poorly handled (the final boss being by far the worst fight in the game seems to be a kingdom hearts tradition at this point), but when 95% of the game is THIS fun, i really cannot complain. outside of the combat, i’d still say kh2 is an improvement on the original game, but a more marginal one. gimmick sections don’t run as long and control much better than in kh1, but i wouldn’t really say they’re a highlight. navigating worlds is much less obnoxious because of the increased linearity, but this does come with the trade off of many of these areas feeling like themed hallways. i could see people being turned off by just how direct this game is about what it needs you to do, but honestly, i don’t play these games for environmental gimmicks or platforming, so it just doesn’t bother me. the tighter level design also comes with the benefit of creating more controlled pacing for each world without making each world feel rushed or lacking in content. enemy variety is also very good for the majority of the game, though i did feel that enemies reliant on zoning (mages, snipers) didn’t feel as different from other heartless/nobodies as those enemy types did in kh1. these are very small nitpicks though, the majority of my time in KH2FMCM was an absolute blast.

when it comes to storytelling, i’d also say KH2 is mostly an improvement on KH1, though maybe a little less focused than CoM. the concept of nobodies is a really interesting one, but i think they were either written in a contradictory manner by accident, or the narrative is just unwilling to interrogate their existence. we’re told nobodies are essentially monsters imitating the appearance of humanity, but with the information we get within the narrative, that simply can’t be true. we see time and time again that nobodies are capable of feeling emotion, and are very capable of having human flaws; in everything but name they really may as well be humans, and xemnas makes a fairly strong argument when he questions why sora even cares. sora has a personal connection to the events, sure, but he isn’t aware of that until very late into the story anyways. the organization’s goals are, in my opinion, deeply sympathetic. we know from playing as roxas for the intro how unfair their nonexistence is, we can tell that they’re “real” people in many ways, we see several of them get actual development. it’s strange, because i can’t really tell what they’re trying to get across. if nobodies are really emotionless zombies filled with malice, why go through the effort to make us care about roxas and axel? if they’re human in all but name, why have sora spend the plot trying to kill them mostly just because he was told to by some old wizard? the meaning to sora’s narrative is similarly confusing to me; considering KH1 and CoM were such strongly focused around the development of their main characters, it felt odd to me that I couldn’t really think of a definitive statement KH2 was trying to make when it came to sora. is it about self-acceptance? is it about sora conquering nihilism? i really couldn’t tell you. on the bright side, the disney worlds are far more interesting, and the hints at a greater lore are all really cool. just wish it felt more coherent as a single story.

chain of memories is a really interesting game conceptually; it was made as a fairly direct gap-filler to lead into KH2, but it also was in response to demand for a portable version of kh1, and it wanted to make a good explanation in-universe for why progression gets reset from KH1 to KH2. ignoring the fact that the last bit is a very funny reason to make an entire game, this mish-mash of goals creates a very odd playing experience. i felt that the focus in the story on jumbled and distorted memories created a fairly strong justification for the repeated worlds and bosses from KH1, while still recontextualizing those moments in a more interesting way. the semi-randomized dungeon crawler elements are also a really cool way to represent the fickle nature of memory through gameplay, and it's very fun to get limited customization of the room layouts depending on the situation. unfortunately, the focus on memories also extends to the combat system, which is very messy and definitely needed a lot of tuning. contrary to what many people say, i don't actually think splitting actions into cards is the problem here (reverse/rebirth proves this, imo). the bigger issue is the deckbuilding, which feels totally at odds with RPG progression and makes COM oscillate wildly between completely trivial combat and absurdly difficult combat. i tend to be a fan of experimental and "imbalanced" progression systems (the junction system in ff8 is a favorite), but COM's cards feel poorly accounted for; the game offers you relatively few guaranteed cards, and those it gives you are likely going to be pretty far from the cornerstones of your deck. this ends up meaning the boss design needs to account for too many potential playstyles, so you get lots of inflated health bars and lots of bosses that are designed around playing defensively and waiting until they have no chance to counterattack. i think it's actually very charming and cool that many of the bosses play by the same ruleset the player does, but because COM has no idea what cards you have, the only real surefire strategy against many bosses is waiting for them to waste their cards on sleights and catching them reloading over and over. if the progression was not as reliant on lucky pulls from packs, these bosses would be able to have more reliable and interesting counterplay, but unfortunately the systems here just don't allow for that. these incredibly boring and drawn out encounters are most noticeable with the final boss of the main game, where the most reliable strategy i could find was just to parry every attack he throws out with a 0 card, then use the cloud summon to chip at him a few times, repeat repeat repeat. this took about 10 minutes, and might be the most boring boss fight i've ever played.
reverse/rebirth fixes basically all of the issues i mentioned above by just giving you set decks for each floor, which makes most of the fights far more interesting. wayyy faster and less reliant on cheese, i love the emphasis on card dueling.
the story in COM is actually really great by the way. i could personally tell it was written after KH2, but it's still a pretty interesting story that explores the inner psychology of both the protagonists a little bit. there's a lot of cool hints at future games (i think, at least) and the addition of organization 13 is just great. i had found the overemphasis on disney elements in the story of kh1 to be a bit frustrating, so COM's story was a great change of pace.

the internet was a paradigm shift, wasn't it? since the late 90s we've seen an increasing amount of discussion around fact and fiction becoming muddied, with the distinction seemingly being irrelevant to many. information is as free as it gets, but the direct consequences for misinformation are minimal. of course, there's no end of works focusing on the subject of truth in the information age; in this very medium you have one of the most prescient and unique statements on the matter with MGS2. the persona 2 duology, however, is unique in that a lot of what it has to say feels before it's time. this is certainly an internet-age set of games, but calling them cyberpunk in any way would be a misnomer. persona 2 really is concerned about the broader societal implications that come about from people being willing and able to believe almost anything, and it directs that focus towards the physical world. in a lot of ways, P2 feels responsive towards the increasing prevalence of conspiracy theories in pop culture (a lot of popular conspiracies are even used as inspiration for plot beats in innocent sin), and i think P2 takes a unique stance in that they don't flat out deny that these things are worth believing in or looking into. rumors come to life, but rumors do have to start from somewhere; there's shreds of truth in any lie.
P2, and especially EP, puts a ton of emphasis on allowing the city to feel lived-in and breathing. for anything you do, there's new dialogue everywhere, and the main progression gimmick (rumors coming to life at the player's will) is utilized in a lot of clever ways to achieve that goal. persona games are known for being text-heavy in general, but i wouldn't be surprised if these two games had some of the larger scripts in the franchise, because every story moment basically changes the whole city. in a game all about listening to the pulse of the city, this feels very appropriate, creating a much stronger sense of immersion than you'd expect for a game like this.

now for stuff focused solely on EP:
out of all of the traditional storytelling archetypes, probably the most common for a JRPG to use is the coming of age story. this makes a lot of sense, logistically; most video game consumers are teenaged, most JRPG protagonists are teenaged, and the power fantasy typically inherent to the genre is about starting from a weak position and growing to be strong. eternal punishment doesn't have these sorts of goals, and it's a lot more engaging for it. EP's cast is a group of adults, and you'd be forgiven for thinking at the beginning of the game that this cast doesn't have much room to grow. indeed, EP's characters definitely do not "grow up" in the way typical for JRPG writing; these characters start out pretty divided and uncomfortable with each other, but there isn't a big climax where they confront their fears all at once and become a team. instead, EP uses optional dialogue to subtly paint a portrait of each of it's cast members and has them slowly begin to open up over time. it's rewarding and immersive to have these characters actually gain new contacts due to these little nuggets of development, and it's a much more lifelike approach to party development than you see in more traditional narratives. a key concept this game has about identity is that it's self-determined; people aren't simply on a search to discover how they really are, but are ever-changing and create the path they walk. i think integrating this into the story by making much of the development up to the player is exceptionally clever. it's a fairly common statement among writers attempting subversive character writing to say that human beings don't have arcs. i feel that this is often used to justify uninteresting or directionless character writing, but in EP it feels like a pretty considered thesis for the game's writing. i guess a better way of saying it is that people don't just have arcs, they don't grow up at one specific point. development here is more like a stream, ebbing and flowing.

STORY SPOILERS HERE
all that being said, eternal punishment was greenlit for a very specific reason; to give an alternate perspective to tatsuya. i also felt that this was done quite well. tatsuya was about as well-characterized as a silent protagonist could get in IS, i felt, but getting a voice definitely helps him. his self-imposed suicide mission is a great narrative hook, and the reasoning behind his existential guilt is one of the best reveals of the story. tatsuya commits (yet another) innocent sin by refusing to forget his friends again, and it's not surprising that he'd try to shoulder the burden to protect their reality. tatsuya is ultimately a character whose greatest weakness is his protective instinct, but through the comfort of the main cast he's able to get past that and use his sins as blessings. it's beautiful payoff for a story that's rife with personal loss and seemingly hopeless odds.
in a lot of ways, P2 reminds me of panzer dragoon saga. both are these hugely ambitious games from around the same time that are driven by the urge to do something different. when i played innocent sin, i felt that that game's attempts at novelty wore thin; the character writing didn't feel dense, the combat was far too easy, and the deviations from standards felt poorly justified by the narrative. although there are still things i dislike in EP, the overall package feels more cohesive. rumors are more immersive and offer more variety, character dialogue is more interesting, the combat and character progression is more difficult but offers more interesting decisionmaking. definitely a huge improvement.

kingdom hearts is probably the most controversial JRPG franchise of all time. it's very common to see non-fans say they can't take it seriously and it's influence ruined franchises they prefer, and it is equally common to see fans say it changed their life and brings them to tears to think about. i think i come somewhere in the middle; kingdom hearts 1 is a pretty moving and cute story for it's target demographic, but it has a lot of clear growing pains that i feel could have been better addressed. the story is probably what i'd single out as the biggest strong point of kh1, it's a very pleasant little story preaching self-belief and perseverance with a lot of fun character moments. the disney stuff, for me, doesn't exactly help but doesn't really hurt. donald and goofy are enjoyable party members that don't really feel too far off from your standard comic relief party members in final fantasy games such as rikku or cait sith. i'm not sure if i'd say the friendship of the party feels especially believable by the end, but it works for the type of story kh1is trying to get across. the original characters are all also pretty fun; i'm not much of a fan of sora, since he feels very stock shonen protagonist, but riku and kairi are both fairly interesting characters. the (unintentional?) gay subtext with sora and riku is definitely the most interesting part of the character interactions in this game, it really oozes out of almost everything riku says and makes things between him and sora a bit more complicated than it initially seems. i felt that the big weakness of kh1's story came down largely to it's focus on the disney elements. many of the worlds are very stripped down versions of movie plots, which aren't really satisfying on their own and aren't really great fanservice, imo. several of my favorite disney movies actually are in kh1, but the only one i felt really happy with the representation for was nightmare before christmas. the good part of this is that the worlds are pretty short and breezy, with very little story, so if you aren't much of a disney fan they aren't tedious or anything. the bad part of this is that the overarching plot still does involve a lot of disney elements up until the last quarter or so, so if you want more meat you're going to be waiting for a while.
where i'm more mixed on kh1 is the gameplay. i played on proud mode, because i wanted to fully engage with the combat and uh... that was a mistake! not because i had too much trouble with the combat, but because kh1 has pretty minimal depth to it's combat, and the boss design can get downright atrocious. the pot centipede, giant ursula, genie jafar, chernabog, basically all of the final bosses, dragon maleficent.. there's so many fights in this game that i wouldn't call hard necessarily but would really call cheesy or boring. for most of the larger bosses the recommended strategy from experienced players is to just mash on them with aero/ra/ga and spam heals when you can with leaf bracer. i only really struggled with a handful of fights, but i would have a lot of trouble naming fights that i struggled on where the difference maker ended up being my skill rather than missing a specific spell or not using a specific summon that trivialized it. things reach a head after the first visit to hollow bastion, because beyond that point kh1 really loves throwing bosses with inflated health bars at you, and in the worst cases, those bosses have a vulnerability window of maybe 2-3 attacks if you're playing fair with them. if that sounds obnoxious and boring, that's because it is, so the recommended strategy for most of these bosses is to make sure to get aeroga and curaga and just wail on them. the room of waves of heartless being spawned on you is also just atrocious, pure chaos with very little counterplay beyond tanking. smart, aggressive play simply does not feel well-incentivized in kh1. i'd say the real peak of the game feeling challenging in a fun way would be the mid-game before you get leaf bracer, and the last fight on the first visit to hollow bastion. that fight kicked my ass a good 4 or 5 times, but it was engaging, fast, lethal, and made me want to get better. i can only hope that future kh games follow that precedent.

asides:
the ff characters in this game, imo, often didn't really act like themselves. squall, i mean leon, especially felt mischaracterized. not a big deal because the story isn't focused on them or anything but as a big fan of 8 i found it a little sad.
music is incredible, i'd mention the heartless theme, kairi's theme, the main theme, and obviously simple and clean as highlights. yoko shimomura is a great fit here, since she's experienced in music for kid's games from the mario rpg series but also has the range for more serious and heartfelt tracks.
the animation is surprisingly very high quality and emotive for a ps2 game, it seems like they really wanted to lean into disney animation principles. genie donald and goofy are all highlights in that regard

thracia is a game that really wants you to reexamine some behaviors and thoughts that you may have considered intrinsic to playing video games. is it worth it to strive for perfection? is fairness really the end goal of difficulty? is there really no honor in cheating? the most common statement you'll see about this game is that it's brutal, and the second most common statement you'll see about this game is that it's "just unfair to new players, but not that hard". neither of these statements are quite true; thracia is a very difficult game, and it is especially unkind to blind players, but it's paradoxically very effectively balanced. for the most part, this isn't a game where you're being put up against enemies way stronger than you, or a game where the enemies are given tons of toys you can't have. thracia is about trying to turn every disadvantage you're given into an advantage, and trying to win by choosing not to play within what the game presents as it's "rules" at all. to me, thracia feels very genuinely revolutionary in a way the prior 4 FEs, all also about revolutions, did not. the fatigue system means you are not allowed to be picky about your units, and you do not get your usual assortment of nobles and world-renown warriors. instead, you get a heck of a lot of bandits and sellswords, not to mention a handful of priests and illegitimate children. speaking of those bandits and priests, they are universally your MVPs in thracia. thracia has a very strong sense of materialism, both in it's plot and mechanics, which means that stealing and capturing weapons is simply your only option for acquiring weapons and money. this means that utility units are much stronger than in any other fire emblem game; not only because you have to steal to survive, but also because disarming is often a better option than just directly killing. why should i murder reinhardt when if i berserk him then sleep him i can get him to thin his troops and steal his gear? why should i bother fighting all these mages when i can send lifis in and just take all their books instead? this stuff brings a really interesting sense of resource management to thracia, and means that the player has theoretically nearly infinite opportunities to get good weapons, but has to gauge whether or not it's worth going for them each time they fight. this is furthered by making villages occasionally very difficult extras to get, and the addition of missable gaiden chapters help this greatly too. thracia has a very strong conception of risk vs reward; to simply clear the maps, you often have very easy and simple options, but simply clearing the maps is rarely enough. you are forced to take gambles to survive, but you are never expected to be perfect. a 100% playthrough of this game would likely increase the playtime by more than half off resets alone, but i don't think that that is a mistake or a negative. to me, thracia is rather genius in that it puts so much decisionmaking in the player's hands, and so little of that decisionmaking directly relates to killing. a good amount of your units can reliably crit, so cutting through enemies isn't something you need to worry too much about.. instead, what you're concerned with is not bleeding out on resources, making sure your units can avoid status effect spam, making sure you can have your units available when you need them. is it bullshit that you can be hit from halfway across the map by a sleep staff in enemy phase? sure. but i can silence that staffer, i can berserk them, i can steal their sleep staff.. you just have so many options, and just killing them is usually the least effective and least interesting one! in another strategy game, this sort of thing would be considered cheese, but here, it's life. you have the option to play "honorably" and fight like a man, sure, but are the enemies fighting honorably? hell no. fuck em. to me, this is exactly the sort of difficulty a strategy game should have. extremely lethal, extremely diverse, and not fair at all... but filled with options for interesting decisionmaking instead of just overstatting brute force ai. there is very little division between what you can do and what the ai can do. the defining difference is that you are not a bot.
STORY SPOILERS AHEAD
storytelling in thracia is another big strength. i think that the very restrained focus here helps a lot with character building and thematics. prior fire emblem games were all extremely grand continent-spanning high fantasy stories, which isn't a problem for those games at all, but i do feel that occasionally the macro scale of those stories meant that we could not feel the struggles of individual characters so closely. even mystery of the emblem, which does have a similar style of gameplay and a comparable story to thracia, is so zoomed out that i could hardly tell you what marth or caeda are feeling about what's happening. by contrast, leif is excellently built up, undergoing strong development through many losses. leif is someone who was born into natural conditions fit for traditional heroism, but is also someone who is given plenty reason to believe that his rebellion will only crush hope. prior lords had generally been characterized by naivety and great kindness; marth had been unable to accept that his allies had turned against him, sigurd had so much faith in the goodness of others that he ended up blind to conspiracy, celica loved alm so much that she was willing to suffer and sacrifice her cause for his sake. leif is anything but naive, and his kindness is often hardly virtuous. leif is racked with self-doubt at every turn, and when he is not, his ignorance and rash attitude bites him in the ass. he wants to save his people and repay the debts of his childhood at all costs, even though it has him taking on more than he can handle. his nobility alienates him from causes that much of his army is fighting for. many of his flaws would make him seem not so dissimilar from the friegian generals he's up against, but the important part is that leif learns from his mistakes as time goes on, and he never gives up. by the end of the game, his title of sage-lord doesn't feel farfetched. the enemy factions in thracia are also very well characterized. one detail i especially like is that the infamous thracian dracoknights rarely show up at all unless they're trying to seize an objective before you, and they're extremely lazy units. they don't leave their posts until you get in their range or split up your units, and they always leave the map when you kill their commander. this gets across very well that south thracia has little passion for the war they've been paid to fight in, they only see their alliance with the empire opportunistically. my only complaint with the story is that the final few chapters feel like a bit of afterthought or obligation story-wise, the audience just doesn't get a lot of in-universe justification for why the strategy is being executed the way it is, probably because it diverges from genealogy at this point. saving eyvel and defeating raydrik both make sense, but the loptrian church has very little personal relevance to the cast here. it didn't bother me because the last stretch of the game is sheer excellence from a gameplay perspective, but i do feel it's worth noting.
some minor notes i couldn't fit in here:
door key softlocks are really dumb and probably the single worst part of this game
chapter 12x and 14x are objectively quite poorly designed chapters for very different reasons; 12x is a chapter that feels almost deliberately designed for you to not engage with playing it, and 14x is a fog of war chapter that has long range troops and random pegasus knight spawns which can capture your units but you can't capture back. i think 14x is still effective narratively, but it's one of the only moments where i felt that thracia was sadistic in a way the player could not appropriately respond to or work around without foreknowledge or with clever strategy.
the variety in objectives is a huge plus for thracia and something i wish had been implented sooner. escape maps and survival maps are both awesome

for a long time, final fantasy was a franchise that didn't really have sequels. it was a franchise where each installment did something different, not as a correction to the prior game, but as a way to push the identity of the franchise further and try to show off what it could be in a different light. this changed with ffx-2, a game which i haven't played (yet). something notable about ffx-2 is that it was following up on one of the most critically acclaimed installments in the history of the franchise. the staff for it went in a radically different direction compared to ffx, because they wanted to keep the franchises' spirit of change and make it clear that they were still trying to take risks. what if ffx had been widely disliked? what if the key staff were concerned with change because they felt it was necessary to regain respect? well, a game like ffxiii-2 would probably happen.
xiii-2 is a game that feels insecure with it's existence. the staff for it clearly understood that for a lot of franchise veterans, xiii was not what they wanted. people didn't like how xiii's narrative was centered around developing a cast that started as extremely flawed characters, so now we've scaled back the cast and both of the main characters are generally likable from the get-go. people didn't like how linear the progression was in xiii, so now we've split the game into like 20 zones that you can choose to tackle in a variety of orders. people didn't like how xiii didn't have a lot of variety outside of combat, so we have puzzles. by GOD we have puzzles. the problem with xiii-2 is that they've followed the criticism based solely on what players directly said, rather than what they meant. sure, these zones are less linear, but they feel even more artificially restrictive than the zones in xiii, because the constant asset reusage means they have to put literal floating walls up to keep you out of certain areas. this zone reusage is a big problem in general, as it leads to a lot of what feels like backtracking, and it rarely if ever connects to the narrative. there's technically more reason to explore than you had in xiii, but it's not because the environments make you want to explore them, it's because they just put invisible collectables everywhere. the new main characters are less immediately flawed, but they have so little in the way of characterization that they feel dull. a lot of the complaints xiii got for it's cast can be chalked up in the first place to it's understated character writing, which slowly built towards an explosive conclusion for each of the characters. here, this is exaggerated to the maximum, with both serah and noel starting out as likable characters, getting little to no development over the next 20 hours, then speedrunning an arc in 30 minutes. the fact that there's more to do in theory here means little because the side content is a handful of casino games and puzzles that oscillate between being incredibly obnoxious and incredibly simple. the new, customizable monster system is very cute and seems like a cool idea, but to accommodate it the difficulty has been massively lowered across the board, meaning one of the biggest strengths of xiii (it's action-packed, fast-paced and nuanced combat system) has been neutered. i didn't feel that xiii was especially flawed to begin with, but the "fixes" here only serve to emphasize the issues present in that game. this isn't to say all the changes are universally bad; there are some nice quality of life changes to the combat. i appreciate that paradigm shifts no longer stop combat for the first animation, i like that you can now swap party leaders, and allowing the player to unlock whatever paradigms they feel like as they progress through the crystarium is a nice middle-ground between the controlled progress in xiii and something like the expert sphere grid. unfortunately, as i mentioned earlier, the balancing of xiii-2 being very weighted on the easy side means that these things don't get to shine as much as i'd like, but they are still nice changes and i appreciate what they were going for.

SPOILER TALK BEGINS HERE
the story in ffxiii-2 may be the most disappointing in the franchise. it has a strong concept that it feels violently opposed to doing anything with. i would LOVE a final fantasy game about time travel, but xiii-2's time travel mechanics follow no internal logic, and feel like an extended excuse to reuse zones and integrate cut content from xiii. the episodic structure the game gets from the time travel focus is a great idea in theory, but in practice it means that character development and plot progression is minimized, creating extremely lopsided pacing and no real plot. for the first 20 hours of the game, i was totally lost as to what anyone could see in this story, because many of the zones do not have any narrative conclusion. it's also very disappointing that, considering xiii didn't give much immediate background to it's world, we never get to time travel to a point before that game's ending. it would have been great worldbuilding to do quests in cocoon during peace-time, or to interact with the gran pulse tribes fang and vanille came from, but instead we're given a few zones that get repeated and the repetitions mostly have pretty similar storylines. when the time travel is integrated more solidly into the plot, it still fails to follow any logic. why can i erase a monster that creates the circumstances for a timeline's existence, and then still return to that timeline whenever i want? how can i "save the future" but the bad ending still persists like a wart? so much of the runtime is spent talking about these narrative mechanics, but none of that time is valuable because the narrative mechanics are complete and utter nonsense. it's not like FF8 or FF10, where there's some stuff that is logically questionable but the plot glosses it over, the entire plot hinges on a system that feels like an afterthought. caius is often brought up as a strength of this game's story, and yes, he's a cool antagonist with a strong presence, but his motivation is also nonsense; caius is motivated by the fact that history changing will inevitably kill yeul, a little girl who is reincarnated for reasons the plot doesn't care to get into. caius' solution to this is not to stand in the protagonist's way and try to correct the timeline that they alter, but rather to change the timeline even more, destroying the entire concept of history somehow, thereby allowing yeul to exist in eternity (if, you know, she didn't already die because literally all of time just got changed). forgiving the fact that this makes caius selfish in a way that is just utterly inhuman (it's not as though caius is in love with yeul, he's just given the duty of being her protector), caius' actions are essentially no different from the protagonists', which he explicitly disagrees with. when it comes to positives, noel is a pretty good character, and 700 AF: A Dying World is a great moment for the story, reminiscent of oerba from xiii. however, i can't act as though this moment was worth the strain it puts on the rest of the story. noel's backstory is very strong, but the story awkwardly sidesteps it for 20+ hours before we finally get there, both with frequent memory loss on noel's part and serah just... choosing not to ask questions? i feel like at that point we'd be better off making noel completely lose his memory at the start of the game, it feels so artificial to have him forget specifically the things that give context to the plot until the game is basically over. the ending is also emotionally pretty strong, though it's a very strange choice narratively because it means that the game disagrees with basically everything xiii had to say thematically... probably not what you want to do in a sequel, but considering the wealth of other ways this game feels reactionary to critique of xiii, i doubt that was an accident.

genealogy of the holy war is, like gaiden before it, an attempt to emphasize the RPG in SRPG. to that extent it does an excellent job; genealogy has a more interesting and diverse cast of characters than prior installments, the plot has genuinely compelling thematic ideas, denser worldbuilding than can even be conveyed in it's runtime, and the gameplay interweaves with those thematics very well. genealogy blows every prior fire emblem story completely out of the park, it really is not close at all. i had trouble believing that this game was even written by the same person, though part of that is probably that the quality of the modern fan translation for genealogy is much much better than the translations for 1-3. also like gaiden, there's lots of big experiments for the franchise; the entire structure of how chapters play out is rethought, abilities have been introduced to freshen up combat, the famous generation gap exists, weapon rank has been introduced, the weapons triangle has been introduced, it goes on and on. the majority of these additions are really interesting and add a lot of depth, which is definitely welcome after fe3 felt a bit like an fe1 expansion pack. the biggest defining characteristic of fe4, to me, is that the game just feels HUGE. you're going through huge maps on a huge story with a huge army that has huge stats... and it takes a huge amount of time. 4's achilles heel is that it's a very padded game, the emphasis on the revamped arena system means that you can often spend over an hour optimizing and grinding units before a chapter even starts, and the chapters usually are equivalent to about 4-5 standard fire emblem chapters crammed together, most of them taking me anywhere between 1-4 hours to complete. the scale shouldnt be an inherent dealbreaker, but unfortunately these maps are just so large that much of the time spent in them isn't really in meat and potatoes SRPG stuff, instead you spend a lot of time walking across countries and maybe grinding out relationships on the way. when combat does happen, you're incentivized to finish it as quickly as possible, because fe4 has a habit of putting large blocks of enemies together and having them all swarm your units at once. the end result is a game where you're spending much more time prepping for a very intense 1-3 turn battle than actually fighting, which is definitely a bit disappointing. i get what they were going for, because elements like the arena grinding are interesting power fantasies at first and it does feel exhilarating to watch your stronger units go up against a swarm of soldiers like it's no problem, but it definitely wears on the player after 40+ hours of it. the weapon rank system is also very rough here, again leading to the issue i mentioned earlier where strong units get stronger and weak units get weaker over time. it is an absolute struggle to get some of your early game units (looking at you alec and noish) to be on par with your stronger units because they're locked to bad weapons. on the other side, your good units will often have more weapons than they know what to do with. once i get a brave lance on erin or a brave axe on lex, why would i ever use anything else? the other main issue i had with genealogy is more of an inherited issue from the games that preceded it, i felt the story was often told in too abstract a manner to connect with it emotionally. a lot of key plot points happen off screen or are portrayed through map sprites, and i found it hard to feel personally invested in the stakes of the story as a result. it also often felt to me that the story's dialogue being limited to castle seizes and the beginning of chapters meant that some of the more interesting topics (child hunts, radicalization, persecution, poverty) couldn't get explored as deeply as i would have liked. i can't fault them too much, because obviously they were simply using the format that they had used for 3 games, but considering how radical of a departure FE4's gameplay is, i wish they had been more willing to experiment with the way the story is delivered as well.

(this review is only for book 2)
mystery of the emblem is a pretty cool game. the mechanics aren't really very different from fe1 (apart from the inventory management being greatly improved, thank you kaga) but this game has much better balance than that game ever did. in fe1 and gaiden it often felt like you were allowed to ignore playing maps "correctly" in favor of just stat checking with strong units; here, it's much more difficult to do that and the early game is much tougher, which does a good job of teaching how the game is supposed to work. the star shards make the game a lot easier when they get introduced, but mystery is still a game where you can't play recklessly or rely on unrealistic mechanical quirks like marth's global taunt. enemies felt much more aggressive here and you can't really gamble with their ai anymore. i felt like i had actually gotten a lot better at fire emblem by the end of the game, which is ideally what a strategy game should do. oh also dancers are so fun. the game felt so much more playable once i got feena, it's unreal.
the plot is pretty stupid, though. mystery starts off strong with marth being turned against on both sides by major players from the first game, and i do love the way this integrates with the story. the early to mid-game throws a lot of maps with absurd amounts of reinforcements at you, which really makes you feel like you're on the run and you're up against something way bigger than your little band of rebels. unfortunately this devolves into marth simply going from place to place to get told (not especially interesting) lore, and the reasoning behind the events of the game are really stupid.
speed also hasn't really improved from the nes games much. units move faster but combat animations are still really slow, a lot of maps are huge, and like i said earlier there's tons of reinforcements in this game, so enemy phase can drag quite a lot. i turned combat animations off pretty early and i didn't regret it. some of them are cool, but not really enough to where it's worth the wait, imo. clarity has greatly improved from the nes games, but it's still missing some information i'd really like to see, such as enemy attack ranges. for most of the game this isn't notable because the only long range units are ballistae, which have very low hit rates, but lategame there's a lot of long ranged mages with meteor, and there's no convenient way to tell when you're in range of them.
the character endings are hilarious man marth's friends must fucking hate him

"a real man ought to be a little stupid", indeed. yakuza 2 follows up on the previous game in a lot of very ambitious ways, but it shoots itself in the foot just as frequently as it triumphs. the combat is more nuanced than in yakuza, but the game is more willing to throw overly tanky encounters at you (seriously, 6 fucking health bars on hayashi?). the story is more complex than in yakuza, but it also has a tone problem, jumping back and forth between a very moving and understated detective story and absurdly overblown, often illogical setpieces. the biggest issue i have with yakuza 2, however, is that it feels very blatantly padded, often giving the player long stretches without clear direction and expecting you to simply accidentally run into the next stage of the plot. there's times when this works, such as the investigative storyline in shinseicho, but much of the time it's used to highlight storylines that don't provide much more to the game than most of the substories. that's not to say 2 is without it's merits at all though, ryuji goda ends up being a very fun antagonist as a strong foil to kiryu. he may deal primarily in aura and atmosphere, but i'll be damned if that aura isn't a strong one. sayama is also a very well-realized character and this game is much more willing to provide quiet, poignant character-building moments because of her presence in the story. the substories here are much more varied and interesting than in 1; you still have your classic "kiryu gets scammed then beats up some guys" stories, but you also get pretty fun and absurd stuff added around them too. it's a shame that the overall package doesn't feel very cohesive, because yakuza 2's strongest moments intrigue me a lot more than anything in 1, but the payoff just isn't really there and it feels like it wants to divert course all the time.

fire emblem gaiden is an immediate huge step up from it's predecessor in every way, but the staircase it's walking up occasionally has giant pits in the middle that it falls down. to move past the dumb metaphor, gaiden really shows a lot of ambition. this game has a craaaazy amount of new features and changes that feel directly responsive to the biggest issues with fe1, and it was honestly pretty shocking to me to find out after playing that nothing here comes back for several installments. some things (like the added world map) feel like they should be standard improvements to the FE gameplay loop. other things (like the magic system, inventory system, and greater emphasis on promotion) are more understandable as to why they didn't return, but are still well-justified systems in the context of this game. i really particularly enjoyed the way promotions work, because each one is genuinely very satisfying and makes you feel like you've earned a lot. when i got delthea into a priestess, she felt like a god. when i got gray into a slayer, he could now dodgetank and soak for weeks. the downside to this, of course, is that growths are very weak in gaiden.. but honestly, i rarely felt i gained a lot per level in fe1 either. here, every class gets a promotion, and every promotion is pretty darn good (sage is a little iffy, but saints, priestesses, slayers, and of course the main character promotions are all very strong). there isn't the same feel that was present in fe1, where you just literally couldn't take some characters all the way to the end because of their weapon type or lack of promotions. everyone in gaiden has a chance, which is pretty important because the cast has been greatly downsized from fe1, nearly cut in half, i believe. each individual unit matters a lot more, and each unit is given more chances to succeed. what's not to like? well... the other downside to all of this is that units rarely feel special. several units feel like they may as well be clones of each other (kamui and saber, may and boey) or otherwise end up equalling out in value. the increased emphasis on character growth through promotions also means that there's more trash encounters (infinite-spawning monsters, anyone?) because the moment to moment goal of leveling up no longer matters much, and gaiden needs to give you lots of options to get to your big promotions. i wasn't bothered by these things, because i didn't really struggle with the spawns and i'm used to grinding from actual jrpgs, but i do understand that to many fire emblem players it's considered a bad habit and antithetical to the game design.
the inventory system has been changed dramatically, only allowing one item per person. this is a big improvement. the lack of resources in gaiden makes both routes feel more meaningfully integrated with the story, and the amount of shifting bullshit around has been reduced by 99%. there simply isn't enough shit to have to sift through any of it in gaiden, which is very welcome after fe1, where half the battle is inventory management. it's also nice for newly recruited units, since they don't actually need a weapon at first to be relevant.
map design is this game's achilles heel, with the latter half loving maps that are obnoxious on purpose and don't offer fun strategic challenges. nobody wants to trudge through deserts and swamps, or run through featureless plains. i understand the reason they did this was likely to emphasize character growth over strategy, but this isn't like a traditional jrpg where combat is a breezy 1-3 minute encounter. here you're fighting battles that go on for 30 mins to an hour, so the statcheckiness of it all wears on the player a lot more. i was never really too weak, but it just isn't satisfying for these maps to be so annoying that the best solution is to warp in and one-shot the boss with alm's bow. lots of war-of-attrition stuff here, too, because of the way resource management works with magic.
oh yeah the story exists. gaiden's story isn't really anything special; celica's route deals with more interesting themes imo and later into the game there's some cool moments where the player is made to feel the urgency and disempowerment of the protagonists, but overall it's nothing to write home about. it's a more functional story than fe1, but it suffers from some pretty stupid late-game twists and a lot of the connections with 1 don't seem to make sense. i feel like this is one area they could have been bolder with.
all-in-all, gaiden is one of the most ambitious games of it's era, but it's still held back by the standards of NES storytelling and the types of jrpgs it's trying to imitate. i'm really excited to see how echoes adds to this, when i get there, because i really do feel like the mechanical framework of gaiden is very strong.

the combat is unnuanced, the story kinda becomes swiss cheese in the last act, and the load times get a bit annoying, but this is still a short and sweet little game. i don't really understand a lot of the complaints with the combat, to me it mostly felt boring because you're rarely if ever required to switch up what you're doing. the game just never really got difficult. most of the things that i assume are well-liked about the yakuza series have a strong foundation here, from the lifelike atmosphere of kamurocho to the pretty heartfelt and virtuous portrayal of kiryu. when you remember that this game came out partially in response to games like GTA san andreas, it makes the willingness to tell this big operatic crime drama pretty impressive. i think the story does a good job of blurring the lines between kiryu's "family" (the tojo clan) and kiryu's family (haruka, yumi, etc). there's a lot of emphasis put here on familial bonds, both literal and figurative, and i think the game executes that stuff quite well. i do wish that yakuza did a better job when it came to the nishiki relationship, though; for how important the game tells you he is to kiryu, you don't really feel it. the final boss fight with him feels like a forced formality rather than a natural conclusion, imo. perhaps i'll feel differently once i (eventually) get to 0.

twewy is a really interesting game. nearly every design decision here is a unique one, and it feels like the game was tailor-made to make as best use of it's hardware as it could (probably because it literally was). this has it's ups and downs when it comes to gameplay; twewy feels noticeably constrained by both technical limitations and the literal time of it's release, but it also functions as a very interesting period piece that hasn't been replicated elsewhere. to me, things like the pin evolution system (especially mingle mode) and the byte system feel as though they were considered within a 2007 japan context and absolutely no other, to a somewhat frustrating degree. it doesn't feel very good playing this game after the fact to have the game's replacement for level ups gated by real-world time, and it especially doesn't feel good for many of the pins worth using to be locked behind interacting with other DS users when there are no other DS users these days. it's arguably a cohesive design choice with the themes of the game, sure, but it's a design choice that has literally aged badly, which i have never really encountered before. twewy's handheld-focused design choices also honestly kind of clash with the progression of the game, which has a tendency to lock you out of areas quite regularly. this isn't to say i think these choices were unequivocally wrong or misguided, i just think that in the rush to do things different some degree of playability was lost. what i can praise, however, is the battle system and how it interacts with the story. i don't actually find the battling in twewy incredibly enjoyable, but it's very effective at getting you into the headspace of neku, with the player initially feeling as though their partner is a burden but eventually opening up and allowing the player to make the most of their combined DPS as a party. it's not the most dense ARPG combat ever made, but i did feel that it really really worked with the story in a way some of the other unique design choices didn't.
as for the story, twewy is mostly pretty enjoyable! this is a story entirely driven by the development of it's main character, and i tend to always like those types of stories, but i do seriously think twewy's exploration of social isolation and depression is pretty strong. the game is obviously written directed towards a teenage audience, and i never felt like it was talking down nor did i feel that it simplified the personal development of it's protagonist too much. stories about these themes tend to feel, to me, that they're written by people who don't really experience those feelings but feel the need to speak to those who do. twewy didn't feel like that at all. what did bother me a bit was the overemphasis of worldbuilding for the rules of the reaper's game, and how those rules often aren't meaningfully used. just as an example; the phone upgrades hanekoma provides really feel like just "more stuff" to add to the table. they don't really come into play with the game's themes and they don't add to the gameplay. reaper creeper and keywords are another example. i feel like in a larger game that's less constrained, these things would matter a lot as puzzle solving tools and would be more than just throwaway bits in the story, but here they don't add up to anything.
overall, i feel like a lot of how you're going to feel about twewy depends on how charmed you are by it's style and bravery. this is perhaps the most 2007 game to ever exist, for better or for worse. personally, a lot of what twewy attempts didn't land, but it's easy to see how it would for someone else.