Playing this right after playing the original Final Fantasy VII added a new wonder to every interaction, location, and especially battle... on the flipside, it made it very, very obvious where the padding went in. Towards the halfway point I found myself very frustrated with how stretched out even the smallest moments of the original game were.

Still, the character work here is amazing, Midgar is an incredible location, whenever the story is moving it's very often full of charm and excitement. The combat emphasizing constantly switching up between party members keeps things fresh and kinetic, although I wish it was a bit more generous with materia slots.

The Yuffie DLC did wonders for Yuffie herself, even if her muscly big bro-type companion felt like a chore to drag around. I was a bit tired of seeing the same Midgar/Shinra locations at this point, but I can sympathize with the devs wanting to keep production time/cost down.

I hope that Rebirth values my time a bit more, and doesn't unnecessarily pad out every possible encounter just to add more time... or at least make them more exciting than moving robot arms around when they do. Get Rebirth to PC soon, Square Enix!

I have played many of the Final Fantasy games before and after VII, but admittedly the early 3D graphics always warded me off of this one. After dipping into the extensive mod base of Seventh Heaven that gave an HD shine to most of the game, I was pretty pleased to find that this game definitely holds up. The foundation of the Active Time Battle system is maybe a bit of a wobbly step sideways into figuring out how to handle turn based and real time battles, but otherwise it does keep the flow of battle moving, although navigating enormous list of items is a bit more of a cost sink than it should be. Generally there's not a lot of active strategy involved in all but the toughest battles, and more piecing together what equipment/materia synergizes the best--although, admittedly, I used guides for figuring this out.

This game is pretty guilty of most of the genre annoyances of this era: endless random encounters, convoluted, strategy-guide-heavy sidequests that feel too masochistic for me to take a whack at--anything that involves hours of grinding is, in my opinion, almost smugly wasting your time--constant backtracking.

Even still, you can definitely feel the scope of this game from the very beginning. I found the core cast and story beats to be affecting all these years later. The major emotional moments still felt moving, even with the plastic, stiff polygonal models. While later Final Fantasy games (including games within the Compilation of FFVII) would get more and more elaborate and perhaps even bloated, FF7 is just on this edge of having interesting layers to peel back while never getting too far up its own intestines. In some ways it reminds me a bit of how Souls games really hook you in with leaving a lot of juicier details in the background for you to put together, giving you a sense of greater investment.

Hogwarts Legacy is an up and down experience, with each success being marred by a necessary caveat. Hogwarts Castle is one of the best realized video game environments I've ever seen--and yet spend a few hours there and the emptiness of the castle becomes overbearingly apparent. The joy of sitting in for the Sorting Ceremony and choosing your wand is exciting for any long-time fan of the series--but I couldn't help but be let down by the impersonal nature of it all. I'm ready to be charmed by my Hogwarts friends, but they function more as tutorial bots for the majority of the game than real characters.

The most remarkable part of the game is that it does manage to be a solid experience, despite everything. I can credit the developers and publisher for not twisting the game into a GAAS cash grab, and I hope that Portkey Games is able to take the solid foundation and pare away the bits that simply drag it down.