After having sat on this game for a few months I can safely say my issue with it is that it feels like a DLC expansion to Kuro 1 (a la Like A Dragon: Gaiden, I assume) that got padded out into it's own game. That in itself isn't a huge problem to me, but the fact that it's a whole ass JRPG length game is. I spent 75-ish hours here and really feel like the whole story of this game could have been told effectively in half the time--maybe even less.

That being said, there is still a lot about this game I like. When the story is allowed to happen uninterrupted, it's (usually) pretty good. Kuro 2 does a great job of fleshing out a number of aspects of the world further. Even if this game does not do much to move the needle further in the overall story of the series, the general worldbuilding of the Zemurian continent has been one of my favorite aspects of the series since the moment I hopped on Sky FC and I'm glad to see the writing team still has this much attention to detail to the land they've created. In the character department, I think there is much work to be done regarding the overall cast and the group dynamic the Solutions Office faces, but individually several of my more liked characters had a ton of good stuff. There weren't many bonding events in this game but whenever there were they were definitely quite the treat; it makes me more confident of the future of the series in that regard as it's always been one of the series' greatest strengths. I'd like to give special shoutouts to Quatre, Renne, and one of my underrated faves Shizuna. With Renne in particular, Kuro 2 feels like a natural conclusion to her series long character arc. I obvs know she'll be back for future titles but her arc has been so damn good this whole time and I really appreciate what they've done with her here. I can't say the same to every character however. There was a lot of nothing done with a number of the cast. Elaine especially is an egregious example of this. Kuro 1 made her into my favorite character in the series just like that, and it disappointed me to see how little she was utilized here, especially with how much she was marketed in the months leading up to the release, and even with how the game's prologue went! One of my gripes with this series is characters just being used as static set pieces sometimes and overuse of that was definitely a knock on the overall quality of the story. The way a number of characters were utilized just frustrates me in general. To compensate for the story it's clear Kuro 2 tried very hard to be Reverie 2 in a number of ways but just couldn't land the way that did. It just doesn't work nearly as well with what they were doing.

Somewhat of a subnote, but the Calvard games have had the best gameplay in the series as well, these games play sooooo fine and I think that's one of the reasons I'll give some of the nonsense in this (and Kuro 1 too as I much as I love that game to death I can't pretend it's infallible) a semi pass. It really feels like as of this story arc Falcom has perfected the gameplay for the series, its so great seeing the progression of the formula of the series and I only think it's gotten better over time. After starting good too!! I'd really say that Kuro/Kuro 2 has a case to be made for being the best combat system ever put in a JRPG. That combined with how much I love the setting made this a much more easy to go down experience and I have nothing but high hopes for how the rest of this series goes in this department.

*Sub-subnote: ah shit this was supposed to be a quick thought and ended up a whole paragraph

Would I call this game bad? I don't know how to answer that if I'm being entirely honest. Kuro 2 is undeniably the definition of a hot mess; it has a lot of great, fantastic even, aspects about it, but at the same time sinks to lows the series has maybe never seen before. This game was very clearly rushed, it could have been so much more had Falcom given it the proper time to cook. I haven't even mentioned the poorly implemented time travel mechanic (if you could really call it a mechanic). There was a lot of good concepts introduced here but never really had the chance to develop them properly. I really wonder how we'll view this game in the future, especially with Kai no Kiseki coming later this year. If the series goes further downhill this game will be chastised to no end, but if Kai ends up being goated I hope we'll just look at this as an intermission of sorts; maybe just a recharching/cooldown period in a string of banger games.

I'm definitely anticipating Kai very heavily, and it's probably safe to say it's the game I'm most looking forward to releasing currently. I'd definitely optimistic about how it'll be, cautiously so, but I know Falcom's writing team has it in them to create something amazing with what they've done, even if I still think this was a very shaky experience. With Cold Steel 4, Reverie, and Kuro 1 being as good as they were, I am very willing to let a sub par game slide as a bump in the road if Kai is a return to form. I know the writing team has that dawg in them still. The extra year given to work on it is the main fuel for my optimism.

Van Arkride...you've rocked my world time and time again. Get it done Spriggan, I know you've got it in you.

A game that knows exactly what it is and celebrates that fact wholeheartedly, this is perhaps the best action game I’ve ever played. Stylish and sick as hell from top to bottom, from the characters, to the music, and the combat, the fucking combat. Doing combo after combo on defenseless demons is one of the most hype feelings imaginable, and when you manage to pull off a series of moves you thought up it gets the adrenaline flowing. I’ve never really been a heavy action game player but this makes me feel like I’ve been in love with the genre for years.

I might’ve played this game on the lowest difficulty but I had such a good time even then that I can for sure see myself replaying, something I don’t really do a lot anymore. Hell I already started doing Devil Hunter mode with Vergil. This game is just too fun, yes I know I sound like a broken record saying this as much as I have but man I haven’t had such a good time with a combat system in years. There’s still so much I don’t fully grasp about it but I’m looking forward to unlocking more skills, doing even wilder moves, and fully mastering this game in due time.

As someone who knew about this game for a long time and knew a lot of the story beats being spoiled through osmosis, I’m still very pleasantly surprised how much I adored it still, along with the fantastic characters. Everyone who’s playable has a unique personality and charm to them along with a signature fighting style that conveys that very well to the player. For a game that I completed in about ten hours, I feel like I’ve grown far more attached to these characters than I would in most given ten hour stretches of games. The dynamics between everyone feel so charged with every interaction being a treat. This being my first go-round with the series I feel like there’s definitely a bunch I’m missing but they knew exactly what to do to bring me up to speed.

I could go on about the story for a while but I’ll simply stick to my basic thoughts of it being fun as hell, intense, and cathartic all at once. Given what I do know about the story of the earlier games this feels like such an immense payoff and if I was a lifelong DMC fan I would’ve been so incredibly happy to see this game come to fruition. The climax was incredible and felt like the culmination of so much about the series, from the relationship between Dante and Vergil, to this being a coming of age story for Nero; all incredibly strong notes to end on.

This game is kinda perfect in my eyes, does its job Smokin’ Sexy Style! all the way through

This was an interesting experience to see if you can ever really get too much FF7. Nomura was definitely cooking something in here, and it had a flavor very unique to his style from the story to the new characters and worldbuilding.

Zack was a very cool character and this game definitely shot him way up for me more. Given how much original FF7 talks about his and Cloud’s dynamic and bond I really loved seeing those two in action together. I really didn’t expect Zack to be as much of a goofus as he was, especially at the beginning of the game. Seeing him come into his own was very cool. It’s kinda neat seeing how Angeal was to him, and then later how he was to Cloud. And to me that makes Cloud’s arc even more interesting retroactively. Both of those two feel even more so human after that. In addition, it was neat to be able to expand on some of the side characters that we hadn’t seen a ton of as well, especially Sephiroth. Seeing a more human side of him made me resonate with him a bit harder and showed his internal conflict leading up to the events of the original game in quite an interesting way.

However, for the other characters that were new to the game, I don’t feel so much the same. As much of a mentor figure to Zack that Angeal was, I can’t say I was very heavily invested in his character. The same can be said for Genesis too. I don’t think their buildup was very compelling and I’m not a fan of how they were used in the overall narrative. Gotta say this game overall doesn’t add much to the story of FF7 other than building up pre existing characters more (Except for Cisseni she was cool).

The gameplay loop was pretty basic; given this was a remaster, not a remake, of a mid-2000s PSP game I wasn’t expecting too much from that. But even so, the whole design of the game was just kinda…there. A lot of the levels felt very short and/or repetitive, and the whole mission structure would have been a total snoozefest if the combat wasn’t surprisingly fun. I had heard this was made into more so of an action game and that did not leave me disappointed. Zack was a very fun character to play as and really carried the missions for me. I’m glad this game is a thing because I really couldn’t imagine going back and playing the original if the combat had been very basic.

Some other minor quirks I have with this game are that I don’t think the voice acting is that great and the fact that this had no chapter select is very irritating, but I’ve already spent so much time talking about other things that there’s not really a need to go into too much detail.

I definitely am glad, not just that I played it, but that I got this game in before Rebirth. Expanding on the lore of FF7 definitely made me even more excited to see what Nomura has planned.

This game was INTENSE. I kinda wish the quality was more consistent thorough the game, act 3 and the finale were insanely fucking strong but before that the game's pretty ehhhh aside from Fragments which is something you don't wanna say about a 100+ hour jrpg. The whole curse aspect was kinda wonky even if I do think it worked which is a good microcosm for how I feel about the quality of this game. Some of the highest highs shadowed by some of the lower lows that really highlight the strengths and weaknesses of Cold Steel as a whole but overall was a really good conclusion to the Erebonia arc :D

Well, what was the point of all that?

I have been racking the question in my head occasionally for bordering on two months now.

There is enough "good stuff" in FFXVI to carry 5 different games on their own. The performances, especially Ben Starr's exceptional turn as clive, are pretty universally excellent. I like the characters, as dirtily done as basically any woman is by the plot. Soken's score is excellent and the sheer level of bombast in it's action scenes is top tier. It is in many ways, a game where a bunch of top-tier creatives are putting out their best work.

And I feel nothing!

Final Fantasy XVI might have a bunch of good shit in it, but it's overall creative direction is very poor. The first half of the game gets carried hard by being focused Clive, who is so brilliantly portrayed (and often, improvised) that when the focus of the game shifts to the larger scale conflicts, and some of the other good characters get less time, it just meanders around towards an eventual ending which might have been good had the back half of the game not just, completely failed to make compelling stakes and interweave this conflict with the characters at all well. This has been a problem with FF before - when the character focus basically departs from FF9's final disc the game limps to the line, for instance - but XVI feels like it has even less of a point and it's lull lasts the majority of the runtime.

This leads to the back half in particular becoming a game of awesome peaks - usually in the Eikon set pieces where it feels like all the talented people in development were actually on the same page - amid a sea of mediocrity, especially on retrospect. I am currently talking to a friend who's playing through FFX and even though it's not my favourite, seeing just a scant screenshot or two of "filler" scenes from Luca or Zanarkand, and I feel right there. With XVI it's been like a month and I had to google the name of the main antagonist of the second half, and that guy has like, a really obvious name too.

Another thing comes out of FFXVI in the end is how... careless it is, to put it nicely. The game's poor direction and failure to make it feel like it's trying to make a point or idk, be art, makes its borrowing of tropes from game of thrones feel all the more egregious. Carelessly throwing about implied sexual violence and its whole slavery thing without having, like, a point - at best it's just weird and uncomfortable and unneccessary, at worst its very suspect, lets just leave it at that. The game's treatment of women in particular ends up as an extremely bitter note that is probably a result of a piling up of uncocious biases rather than malice, but that's not good either!

This is to say nothing of the continually weak sidequests and questionable game structure, that it should have culled way more RPG elements, that its way too easy on the first run and more! But these are incidental problems in a game that just fails to make me feel anything when that was clearly what the intention was.

I love parts of XVI. I love Clive, Gav, Cid, Mid and Jill even if the game doesn't. I love the Eikon fights. I love the music. I can't love the game they're in, which in poor direction just wastes what good it's got.

It really should not be the case that Final Fantasy XVI, a game produced by a development team of legends with a nigh-infinite budget and all the time in the world should not be a legitimately more careless and harder to love game than Wanted: Dead, the follow up to devil's third where a lot of the creative decisions were made by an eccentric Swiss billionaire who has probably defrauded the russian state and really likes Stefanie Joosten. But here we are.

Clive “Mine’s Bigger” Rosfield is the himbo hero Final Fantasy needed. I just wish the story and themes built up around him weren’t held together with elmers glue and scotch tape. In lieu of any well-articulated thoughts (DeviousJinjo’s writeup and the Insert Credit episode on this capture my feelings nicely), please partake of some stray notes:

There’s still some quintessential FF-ness here—I felt it most in the spirit of the cinematics and the moments when pretty people say pretty things to one another while rapturous music accompanies them—but I found myself sorely missing a substantial party dynamic or sense of exploration

From a character/writing standpoint, every single woman in this game was a mess of squandered potential (Mid being the possible exception—and aided by her distance from the spotlight)

The combat’s good fun but feels stretched thin over the game’s runtime; however, the boss-to-scrub-encounter ratio was seriously impressive

The villain is such a snoozy bag of nothing, but there's an amazing part where he affectlessly says "such foul attaint may not be sublimed through gainstanding" while going super saiyan...I don't think even Joyce could keep up with this guy

And to end, a dumb analogy:
Cid : FFXVI’s story :: a mother crystal’s heart : the rest of the mother crystal