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!!! MOVE OVER GAMERS, WE GOTTA GET THIS REVIEW OUT BEFORE CHRISTMAS !!!
You want to know the funniest thing about being a kid? It’s being ignorant to the fact that some things are just horseshit, and boy was kid me quite the ignoramus. Revisiting this game, it’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting myself into but there was some sick part of me that wanted to relive a good moment of my life in the one Spyro game I have the most unblurry memories of.
Well it turns out, those memories end at the 2nd level and nothing beyond it. Even the borderline racist NPCs somehow scrubbed from my mind. There’s no shot I finished this as a kid, and my memories kept the better portion of the game in stasis forever. They’re not good levels per se, just functionally better. After that the game quickly hurtles closer towards dystopia the further you get into it. To put it quite bluntly, this game is just not finished and couldn’t be more of a beacon of developmental hell. Except this was from the PS2/Gamecube era back in 2002 and.. yeah folks, crunch and corporate shenanigans have been happening our entire lives. This shit was made in the same time it takes to grow a human fetus and still somehow ended up being more of a disappointment.
With vast levels that are emptier than corn fields and enemies with zero life put into them. There’s no variety to be seen, just small ranged dinosaur and big dinosaur who make this sound when you murder them. If this game has achieved anything, it’s that it is at the very least sometimes funny. But you won’t be laughing when the camera 360 no scopes itself into the wall of the level design, launching you off the platform that you’re currently standing on. On normal hardware this game runs like it’s being squeezed through a tube, but even while playing it through unscrupulous means there still feels like there’s some sort of wind resistance pushing against Spyro as he charges. He feels like he weighs a metric ton, which makes platforming a goddamn nightmare. If that’s not enough for you, throw in some magic floors that clip through your body, and mini-games made by Satan himself. The draw distance is abysmal. You want to go on your cozy little gem collectathon, but they removed Sparx’s little hint clues which means you’ll be scouring all of these gigantic levels for much longer than you want just for that one last gem to appear out of thin air because it glitched out the first time. It's actually a marvel of achievement that speedrunners were able to figure out how to beat this game in 1 minute, the amount of time it takes for the veil of nostalgia to be sucked from your eyes.
What’s it all for, you may ask? Well, some of the most weirdly named Dragonflies I could have ever imagined. They really just pulled from anywhere with these guys. “Hey, it’s Karen!!” Spyro says, but the subtitle says “Rhett.” I can’t believe my childhood hero Spyro just deadnamed that dragonfly. And like I said, these issues get more prevalent as the game keeps going. With each level, the more unfinished it feels. The worlds get emptier with more nonsensical tasks that barely function. Assets aren’t re-used, but still uninspiringly pulled from previous titles in an effort to save time. Unlockable powers that get used less and less, voice lines completely missing in some instances, etc., etc. It all culminates into a final boss fight that not even I could foresee. A baffling affront to God himself, just a gauntlet of atrocities deep fried through the Christmas deadline conveyor belt. Spyro died and we killed him.
Keep this game dead, do not “reignite” it. There is no redemption to be had. Lock this one in the vault and treat it like a lesson. One day you too could make your own Enter The Dragonfly, and you don’t want to be that guy. Sometimes things should be left as memories in our heads, never to be revisited. This is a ghost for a reason, so fear it.
Now for the end of this review, I feel like it’d be only fitting to just stop talking in the middle of my
You want to know the funniest thing about being a kid? It’s being ignorant to the fact that some things are just horseshit, and boy was kid me quite the ignoramus. Revisiting this game, it’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting myself into but there was some sick part of me that wanted to relive a good moment of my life in the one Spyro game I have the most unblurry memories of.
Well it turns out, those memories end at the 2nd level and nothing beyond it. Even the borderline racist NPCs somehow scrubbed from my mind. There’s no shot I finished this as a kid, and my memories kept the better portion of the game in stasis forever. They’re not good levels per se, just functionally better. After that the game quickly hurtles closer towards dystopia the further you get into it. To put it quite bluntly, this game is just not finished and couldn’t be more of a beacon of developmental hell. Except this was from the PS2/Gamecube era back in 2002 and.. yeah folks, crunch and corporate shenanigans have been happening our entire lives. This shit was made in the same time it takes to grow a human fetus and still somehow ended up being more of a disappointment.
With vast levels that are emptier than corn fields and enemies with zero life put into them. There’s no variety to be seen, just small ranged dinosaur and big dinosaur who make this sound when you murder them. If this game has achieved anything, it’s that it is at the very least sometimes funny. But you won’t be laughing when the camera 360 no scopes itself into the wall of the level design, launching you off the platform that you’re currently standing on. On normal hardware this game runs like it’s being squeezed through a tube, but even while playing it through unscrupulous means there still feels like there’s some sort of wind resistance pushing against Spyro as he charges. He feels like he weighs a metric ton, which makes platforming a goddamn nightmare. If that’s not enough for you, throw in some magic floors that clip through your body, and mini-games made by Satan himself. The draw distance is abysmal. You want to go on your cozy little gem collectathon, but they removed Sparx’s little hint clues which means you’ll be scouring all of these gigantic levels for much longer than you want just for that one last gem to appear out of thin air because it glitched out the first time. It's actually a marvel of achievement that speedrunners were able to figure out how to beat this game in 1 minute, the amount of time it takes for the veil of nostalgia to be sucked from your eyes.
What’s it all for, you may ask? Well, some of the most weirdly named Dragonflies I could have ever imagined. They really just pulled from anywhere with these guys. “Hey, it’s Karen!!” Spyro says, but the subtitle says “Rhett.” I can’t believe my childhood hero Spyro just deadnamed that dragonfly. And like I said, these issues get more prevalent as the game keeps going. With each level, the more unfinished it feels. The worlds get emptier with more nonsensical tasks that barely function. Assets aren’t re-used, but still uninspiringly pulled from previous titles in an effort to save time. Unlockable powers that get used less and less, voice lines completely missing in some instances, etc., etc. It all culminates into a final boss fight that not even I could foresee. A baffling affront to God himself, just a gauntlet of atrocities deep fried through the Christmas deadline conveyor belt. Spyro died and we killed him.
Keep this game dead, do not “reignite” it. There is no redemption to be had. Lock this one in the vault and treat it like a lesson. One day you too could make your own Enter The Dragonfly, and you don’t want to be that guy. Sometimes things should be left as memories in our heads, never to be revisited. This is a ghost for a reason, so fear it.
Now for the end of this review, I feel like it’d be only fitting to just stop talking in the middle of my
Final Fantasy XVI
2023
DISCLAIMER: This is the first game I have reviewed where an update, version 1.3.1, has come out before I beat it that added substantial QoL. Usually I don't update my games but it read like no nerfs, only buffs so I said why not? As such, some topics about early game might no longer be viable but because I was more than halfway through when the patch dropped I cannot correct those topics without another playtrhrough. It is worth bringing up because it did, in fact effect my score
As usual, I will try to not do any story spoilers but gameplay is free reign. I had worries going into this game, most due to the style of combat they decided to go with. Would fight be too long? Would the darker tone come off as "what your average 13 year old wants all media to be"? Many said to me "Trust in Yoshi P" but when you also don't care for the game that got him his standing, it isn't something I'm going to do easily.
As far as plot goes, I was slipping in and out of interest as the game went on. I had played them demo on release but I redid the intro again for easier reacclimation and reminder of purpose. The early plot I was the most engaged with and given how most jrpgs are, it was totally unexpected. The entire mid plot however, I had zero interest whatsoever and was just going through it to get through but thankfully once that was resolved the plot also became interesting again. The general pacing didn't help, and its one of those "Oh right, the mmo team made this" aspects. There are sidequests that are only not classified as such due to them having the red marker instead of green. Come come off this large climactic moment and you next course of action is running back an forth between 3 people to have them talk to you and then maybe go do a fetch quest or fight a group of fodder enemies, after of course seeing a cutscene shown via a map with pieces on it to illustrate "what has now happened". I guess they blew the budget on other things because this reeks of trying to cut down on something. We saw plenty of scenes where the main cast should have no way of knowing so why go about it this way? If I was just told "oh yeah this happened" in a blurb it would have had the same outcome. And yes, majority of the sidequests are awful but I did them all anyway and thank god that update added the quick warp back to the questgiver. I was real tired of Clive's "its chilly outside but I'm too lazy to bundle up but I gotta get the mail" jaunt of a walk in the hubs. Why didn't they allow him to dash? This is in EVERY hub, town whatever. I swear if the teleport wasn't added it would have put another 45 minutes to the total game time. I will say though, the darker nature of this game had me shocked at some actions they took. I certainly never would have expected violence of that type in a Final Fantasy game before. Also lots of Fucks were said, sometimes comically so.
The characters were, fine I guess. Honestly I didn't really have a favorite aside from Torgal. Clive seems to be very well liked and I can see why, Ben Starr did a pretty damn great performance. Cid had a very nice voice too. But Torgal, I think he's up there in terms of video game dog hierarchy. My boy was doing some sick ass combos and follow ups on enemies both in and out of cutscene. Everyone else I couldn't care less about and thats probably another large reason why I was having a hard time keeping interest in the plot. I'm probably not gonna remember most of the character's names outside of the main like 5, and one unfortunate girl who's nickname is an accurate description of interacting with her.
The music was very good. The ost had a lot of slower, soft and somber tracks which if anyone knows me are my favorite types. There was even a rendition of the main theme that is probably my number 2. I'm just a sucker for that theme, its like a cheat code to get a smile out of me in an FF game. The prelude was also invited to the game and its renditions were nice as well. The most surprising thing was even the battle music had its slower moments. I'm trading blows with a boss and suddenly the strings come in and its like something I'd hear during some high class party, not a life or death battle.
I'll be a lot more detailed going forward, because we're entering the gameplay now.
Lets start with the game's gear and general itemization. Why is it even here? This gear system is 6 items: Your weapon, belt, arm and three accessories. There is only 1 weapon type Clive has access to and that is his sword and all that matters with them is the attack and stun numbers, this goes for your belt and arm gear as well but it replace attack and stagger for defense and bonus health. Majority of the time both will increase so it doesn't matter. There was maybe two times were I had to choose between keeping my current sword on or using one that only had more attack or stagger. There is also no innate elemental affinity to the weapons themselves. Flametounge, Icebrand, Gaia Sword etc just do typeless damage. The accessories is where you're gonna get any sort of meaningful changes from however its still not much. You have your usual stat increase ones for attack, defense and HP (the rest of the stats despite being in the level up menu seem straight up pointless), your "easy mode" ones that automate certain aspects and then ones that decrease the cooldown of your eikon abilities or their damage. I played on action difficulty the whole time (basically normal) and I never saw a reason to swap from the increased exp, increased ap and auto charge magic ones once they were unlocked. I did try the eikon related ones but the changes seemed negligible on action, on final fantasy difficulty (that you need to beat the game to access) I'm sure they're more necessary. The game also has a crafting system which also begs why its even in the game. There are weapons and gear that can only be crafted and you can also reinforce you gear to make it stronger. Sounds fine so why does am I questioning it existing? Because most materials are in abundance! Unless it was a sidequest, mark or boss reward I never was lacking and could make gear the moment it appeared. Even the limited materials were only needed for the specific items so their rarity was more just to block you out of getting stronger stuff early than anything. Your consumables are also limited in terms of how many you can hold of each, you can also only access 3 types at a time that you set and they're all standard. Potion, Hi Potion, attack/defense buff potions, elixer, one time revive elixer etc. Hey though, this is probably the first final fantasy game I can say I used the standard potion during the final boss!
Exploration was barely a thing. Sure there were some more open maps but most of the time it was empty with just the scenery and a couple enemies. The chests you run into would mostly have either gil or materials, with the more important ones being in the story based mapless dungeons. Clive has access to that dash I complained about earlier but outside of the more hallway oriented parts it isn't enough. Even when you get the Chocobo, I think she's too slow. She's faster than Clive for sure but I don't know, she just didn't feel like she helped me get to where I wanted to go all that much quicker. I fast traveled any chance I could have.
Combat is the big thing in this game. "Devil May Fantasy/ Final Fantasy May Cry", its as deep ad you want to make it but even then I didn't find it any deeper than waist high. You have a handful of tools at your disposal: Perfect dodging, parrying, ability and dodge canceling, timed magic burst, eikon switching,ariel rave air combos, however you only have one singular 4 hit combo as you main and I think is the largest issue. There should have been more routes, maybe delayed style to vary it up a bit because no, the eikon abilities do no do enough since they are limited as well. You can set up to 3 eikons in your loadout, and each has 2 slots you can put a skill in along with each one having a unique mechanic like a dash, charge or block on the other button since X is relegated to jump. This limits them greatly, each eikon has 4 moves not counting the unique one and the skills can only be changed outside of battle. Upgrading costs AP with some of them being expensive to master with the point of mastering being that skills can be used on other eikon sets. Once I got my full moveset situated, I build my loadout and didn't bother with tinkering for the remaining 1/3 of the game. Titan's was probably my favorite because I am a simple man and anything that allows me to punch is my go to. Before I unlocked it I was honestly not into the combat, just going through the motions hoping it would eventually become fun. Flurry of Punches was just so satisfying and the fact it could be used to counter not just melee but also magic made it even sweeter. The eikon abilities are the closest thing you will have to a different weapon type in the game. Magic is just aesthetic, as it changes with each eikon equipped but otherwise did no difference in damage and enemies didn't seem to have any weaknesses.
Credit where its due, the normal fights never dragged on which was one of my largest fears going in. I say normal fights because the stagger rears its ugly head here and if any of you read my FF7 Remake review then you know how I feel about their last attempt at it. I can say here while the general feeling of "it feels more like a nerf and then allowed to do full damage", aside for a SINGLE fight it never once reset after a cutscene. The bosses did drag at times, but I expect a boss to have more health so I'm not too annoyed about it. Some of those fights were pretty damn great anyway. The sidequests are the weakness of the devs but the cinematic aspect of the bossfights are their strengths. One fight its a tense one on one sword, perfect dodge and parry fest and the other is an Asura's Wrath level event. I do think the Eikon fights could have used more depth, the trickle of moves made the first few some of the slowest fights in the game but in terms of pulling them out to fight they showed a surprising amount of restraint. The setpieces of these eikon fights were lovely to see for the first time and the sense of scale was preserved no matter what they did. I do think that these would be the worst part of replay though, due to just how cinematic they can be. I hope you like quicktimes, especially the mashing kind. Also I don't know where to put this but an enemy had an attack called "Spirits Within" and I find that funny.
Saying that this game was a twice as long but half as fun Devil May Cry is false, there is much more to the game than that and same goes for the "Final Fantasy of Thrones" or "Game of Final Fantasy" or whatever that joke name was. However in trying to make sure the usual rpg fan can get in, the combat is shallower than what a character action stlye enjoyer would want so as a fan of both it left me doubly displeased. The story had more ups and down than a merry go round horse in terms of its pacing, it could have used some fat trimming. Turning such a longstanding plot tradition on its head could just be for the sake of it or those who try to find meaning in every sentence could see it as a direct statement on some reliance of the past and needing to break it. Despite that I will still never agree with Final Fantasy ditching turn based/atb and going full on combo MAD, but I wouldn't be opposed to coming back to FF17 if they allow the combat to pull from more of the movesets. I don't know if the darker tone is going to be the standard going forward, but maybe don't realy on people yelling FUCK so much, eh? FF16 tried dto do something new, its trying to get its feet planted on the ground again, which some would argue its been doing since FFX, but the groundwork is here. Whenever I get around to Rebirth, its combat is gonna have a hard time comparing and this is exactly why I went through FF7R before this. I wonder if those Torgal plushies are still on sale?
As usual, I will try to not do any story spoilers but gameplay is free reign. I had worries going into this game, most due to the style of combat they decided to go with. Would fight be too long? Would the darker tone come off as "what your average 13 year old wants all media to be"? Many said to me "Trust in Yoshi P" but when you also don't care for the game that got him his standing, it isn't something I'm going to do easily.
As far as plot goes, I was slipping in and out of interest as the game went on. I had played them demo on release but I redid the intro again for easier reacclimation and reminder of purpose. The early plot I was the most engaged with and given how most jrpgs are, it was totally unexpected. The entire mid plot however, I had zero interest whatsoever and was just going through it to get through but thankfully once that was resolved the plot also became interesting again. The general pacing didn't help, and its one of those "Oh right, the mmo team made this" aspects. There are sidequests that are only not classified as such due to them having the red marker instead of green. Come come off this large climactic moment and you next course of action is running back an forth between 3 people to have them talk to you and then maybe go do a fetch quest or fight a group of fodder enemies, after of course seeing a cutscene shown via a map with pieces on it to illustrate "what has now happened". I guess they blew the budget on other things because this reeks of trying to cut down on something. We saw plenty of scenes where the main cast should have no way of knowing so why go about it this way? If I was just told "oh yeah this happened" in a blurb it would have had the same outcome. And yes, majority of the sidequests are awful but I did them all anyway and thank god that update added the quick warp back to the questgiver. I was real tired of Clive's "its chilly outside but I'm too lazy to bundle up but I gotta get the mail" jaunt of a walk in the hubs. Why didn't they allow him to dash? This is in EVERY hub, town whatever. I swear if the teleport wasn't added it would have put another 45 minutes to the total game time. I will say though, the darker nature of this game had me shocked at some actions they took. I certainly never would have expected violence of that type in a Final Fantasy game before. Also lots of Fucks were said, sometimes comically so.
The characters were, fine I guess. Honestly I didn't really have a favorite aside from Torgal. Clive seems to be very well liked and I can see why, Ben Starr did a pretty damn great performance. Cid had a very nice voice too. But Torgal, I think he's up there in terms of video game dog hierarchy. My boy was doing some sick ass combos and follow ups on enemies both in and out of cutscene. Everyone else I couldn't care less about and thats probably another large reason why I was having a hard time keeping interest in the plot. I'm probably not gonna remember most of the character's names outside of the main like 5, and one unfortunate girl who's nickname is an accurate description of interacting with her.
The music was very good. The ost had a lot of slower, soft and somber tracks which if anyone knows me are my favorite types. There was even a rendition of the main theme that is probably my number 2. I'm just a sucker for that theme, its like a cheat code to get a smile out of me in an FF game. The prelude was also invited to the game and its renditions were nice as well. The most surprising thing was even the battle music had its slower moments. I'm trading blows with a boss and suddenly the strings come in and its like something I'd hear during some high class party, not a life or death battle.
I'll be a lot more detailed going forward, because we're entering the gameplay now.
Lets start with the game's gear and general itemization. Why is it even here? This gear system is 6 items: Your weapon, belt, arm and three accessories. There is only 1 weapon type Clive has access to and that is his sword and all that matters with them is the attack and stun numbers, this goes for your belt and arm gear as well but it replace attack and stagger for defense and bonus health. Majority of the time both will increase so it doesn't matter. There was maybe two times were I had to choose between keeping my current sword on or using one that only had more attack or stagger. There is also no innate elemental affinity to the weapons themselves. Flametounge, Icebrand, Gaia Sword etc just do typeless damage. The accessories is where you're gonna get any sort of meaningful changes from however its still not much. You have your usual stat increase ones for attack, defense and HP (the rest of the stats despite being in the level up menu seem straight up pointless), your "easy mode" ones that automate certain aspects and then ones that decrease the cooldown of your eikon abilities or their damage. I played on action difficulty the whole time (basically normal) and I never saw a reason to swap from the increased exp, increased ap and auto charge magic ones once they were unlocked. I did try the eikon related ones but the changes seemed negligible on action, on final fantasy difficulty (that you need to beat the game to access) I'm sure they're more necessary. The game also has a crafting system which also begs why its even in the game. There are weapons and gear that can only be crafted and you can also reinforce you gear to make it stronger. Sounds fine so why does am I questioning it existing? Because most materials are in abundance! Unless it was a sidequest, mark or boss reward I never was lacking and could make gear the moment it appeared. Even the limited materials were only needed for the specific items so their rarity was more just to block you out of getting stronger stuff early than anything. Your consumables are also limited in terms of how many you can hold of each, you can also only access 3 types at a time that you set and they're all standard. Potion, Hi Potion, attack/defense buff potions, elixer, one time revive elixer etc. Hey though, this is probably the first final fantasy game I can say I used the standard potion during the final boss!
Exploration was barely a thing. Sure there were some more open maps but most of the time it was empty with just the scenery and a couple enemies. The chests you run into would mostly have either gil or materials, with the more important ones being in the story based mapless dungeons. Clive has access to that dash I complained about earlier but outside of the more hallway oriented parts it isn't enough. Even when you get the Chocobo, I think she's too slow. She's faster than Clive for sure but I don't know, she just didn't feel like she helped me get to where I wanted to go all that much quicker. I fast traveled any chance I could have.
Combat is the big thing in this game. "Devil May Fantasy/ Final Fantasy May Cry", its as deep ad you want to make it but even then I didn't find it any deeper than waist high. You have a handful of tools at your disposal: Perfect dodging, parrying, ability and dodge canceling, timed magic burst, eikon switching,
Credit where its due, the normal fights never dragged on which was one of my largest fears going in. I say normal fights because the stagger rears its ugly head here and if any of you read my FF7 Remake review then you know how I feel about their last attempt at it. I can say here while the general feeling of "it feels more like a nerf and then allowed to do full damage", aside for a SINGLE fight it never once reset after a cutscene. The bosses did drag at times, but I expect a boss to have more health so I'm not too annoyed about it. Some of those fights were pretty damn great anyway. The sidequests are the weakness of the devs but the cinematic aspect of the bossfights are their strengths. One fight its a tense one on one sword, perfect dodge and parry fest and the other is an Asura's Wrath level event. I do think the Eikon fights could have used more depth, the trickle of moves made the first few some of the slowest fights in the game but in terms of pulling them out to fight they showed a surprising amount of restraint. The setpieces of these eikon fights were lovely to see for the first time and the sense of scale was preserved no matter what they did. I do think that these would be the worst part of replay though, due to just how cinematic they can be. I hope you like quicktimes, especially the mashing kind. Also I don't know where to put this but an enemy had an attack called "Spirits Within" and I find that funny.
Saying that this game was a twice as long but half as fun Devil May Cry is false, there is much more to the game than that and same goes for the "Final Fantasy of Thrones" or "Game of Final Fantasy" or whatever that joke name was. However in trying to make sure the usual rpg fan can get in, the combat is shallower than what a character action stlye enjoyer would want so as a fan of both it left me doubly displeased. The story had more ups and down than a merry go round horse in terms of its pacing, it could have used some fat trimming. Turning such a longstanding plot tradition on its head could just be for the sake of it or those who try to find meaning in every sentence could see it as a direct statement on some reliance of the past and needing to break it. Despite that I will still never agree with Final Fantasy ditching turn based/atb and going full on combo MAD, but I wouldn't be opposed to coming back to FF17 if they allow the combat to pull from more of the movesets. I don't know if the darker tone is going to be the standard going forward, but maybe don't realy on people yelling FUCK so much, eh? FF16 tried dto do something new, its trying to get its feet planted on the ground again, which some would argue its been doing since FFX, but the groundwork is here. Whenever I get around to Rebirth, its combat is gonna have a hard time comparing and this is exactly why I went through FF7R before this. I wonder if those Torgal plushies are still on sale?
Sand Land
2024
Despite how much marketing this game seemed to have such as sponsored streams by people who aren't even in the anime space, a demo, and so many ads (unless I was targeted because I frequent the DBZ side of the internet), and this being a full multimedia event with an anime, this was probably the hardest time I've ever had finding a game on release day and not because I think the game is flying off the shelves. Amazon had the order delayed to the following Monday, I couldn't find a copy and any video game carrying department store like Wal Mart or Target within a 45 minute drive and even fuckin pawngamestop didn't have copies but Stellar Blade apparently is in abundance. I ended up double dipping and grabbing a digital copy (praise be to whatever god allowed this game to be only 20GB) while the amazon order got situated because goddamn it, I was looking forward to this. I think this is one of those underproduced copy situations but it gave me time to read the manga before getting into this.
Akira Toriyama's work was one of my main gateways into anime back in the day, with DBZ's ocean dub because I'm that fucking old. His artstyle is something I will always enjoy its why I played games like Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest that to this day I think is such a standout in the genre. I'm glad another of his works is getting adapted in game form. I think his artstyle translated well in game, especially in terms of the bots (the machines you use throughout the game). That man really loved drawing vehicles and machines and it shows, especially since Sand Land's inception was because he just wanted to draw an old man with a tank which grew into something he never intended it to. Yes some characters I could see the "building blocks" and traits shared from his other work (I will always see Mr. Satan when I see that long square jaw) but his creature designs are also in full effect with giant cats with sabre teeth, dinosaurs with weird tails and prominent back and head spines, large toothed Pteranodons etc, they stand out even if the designs in game get re-used quite a bit with as much as a pallet swap and maybe one slight addition like a head piece to differentiate unless its a boss. There was also a design that was outright used in OG Dragon Ball that I was happy to see. There isn't as much to say about the style of the environments other than they look good and accurately reflect what they're named, Sand Land is very much a land of sand but I am grateful that it is not the only type of scenery available all throughout the game.
The story of the first half of the game mostly follows the manga, two demons venture out with an old man in a tank to find water, but some parts have had their order changed or elongated and there were brand new things added to what I assume more organically bridge into the second half which is entirely new. As I said in the intro, I read the manga but I did not watch the anime which I'm sure this new stuff is covered there. One of the notable new things added to the first half is the new party member, Ann. Originally it was just Rao, Beelzebub (who you play as) and Thief but she joins as the resident gearhead and a more organic style reason why the characters can get more bots because the manga was ONLY the tank. Well that is technically not true. Rao had a car but in the manga when it gets ruined it doesn't get fixed unlike in the game. I did enjoy the main group and think Ann was a great addition, though I can't say they aren't predictable as characters. Aside from a couple of the villains, the ones you spend the most of the time fighting against, I can't say I share the same feelings towards. They are just as basic, not that its a bad thing but it leads to some disengaging of interest in the narrative when I can predict every single plot beat introduced in the post manga content. I'm not saying I was expecting some Yoko Taro or Kojima level narrative and Sand land's is by no means bad, it just didn't do enough to make the predictability engaging. What you think is going to happen after reading the synopsis, is more than likely what will happen. The voice acting is hit or miss with I think Rao having the worst of it which is bad because he is one of the main characters with more of the important lines. I feel like they were going for the "battle hardened, tired old man has seen some shit" route but he is mostly so monotone it comes off as disinterested and doesn't match the character's emotion that is portrayed by the model's animations a lot of the time. Most other named characters were either good or fine but outside of the actual cutscenes, the stilted line reading that is common in this style of game makes even VA's like Kira Buckland (Ann's VA) unable to reach the levels we know they can. The dialogue that occurred during traversal also repeated a lot, and I mean A LOT. The dialogue updates after story beats but I heard the same line of dialogue three times on average when exploring ruins or doing story based dungeons. Its not as if they're allergic to dead air because there's plenty of times without it but other times they talk like its some first party sony game giving you a hint every 10 seconds. "We could get up here, if we had a bot that could jump" Beelzebub says as I am JUMPING IN THE JUMP BOT. This happens every time. I was also surprised that I enjoyed the music. Make no mistake you get plenty of "Desert Music" but the tracks that play specifically in the dungeons and towns at night were pretty beautiful.
So how's the gameplay then? Does it carry it if the narrative is as standard as I say? Depends. Do you like driving around? Because you will be doing A LOT of that. I would say 75% of the game was me driving a bot across the maps and doing various activities. There's grotto's to explore, hills to jump up (the game calls them hills but they're more like tall rock formations), field bosses to fight, bases to raid where some are stealth based and others are combat, ruins to explore and radio towers to fix, bounties and races. Those radio towers are not something you have to climb don't worry, and their requirement to fix might as well be non existent with how little you need and how plentiful those resources are as never once did I have to take a leave and come back to fix it and yes it does populate the map with undiscovered activities in the area. The grottos are just these small single room caves that have chests or ore deposits, maybe an enemy or two inside and sometimes need rocks destroyed to access. The hills are these tall rock formations that usually have a group of enemies you should defeat before jumping to the top and getting the treasure or ore deposits. Treasure chests have either materials or parts for the bots in them with the latter being in the large variant of chests. Ruins are generally larger than the grottos and sometimes have multiple entrances. Going through them you'll run into enemies, platforming challenges, and destructible rocks while you look for chests and ore deposits where both tend to be exclusive materials which in my case was assorted coins and old variants of metals. Unless I was just being blind, which is possible, the ruins always seemed to just...end. There wasn't really a noticeable "end point" or even a boss outside of specific mission based circumstances. It made them feel pretty limp, I'll be honest. The field bosses are differently designed but larger versions of the dinosaurs, panthers and crocs who's movesets aren't much different from their grunt counterparts. The human bosses are strictly from missions and have a lot more going for them than their animal counterparts or underlings. They are not just palette swaps with basic gear on their bots like what you find in the field, they have unique or specific optional parts for their bots to make the fights a bit more interesting such as emp mines, large missile packs or a grapple that then shoves 4 drills in you for massive damage.
If you aren't doing those then your time is spent driving around in whatever bot of your choice (until you need to swap for a specific feature one has), grabbing materials so you can upgrade your bots, finding fast travel points, shooting enemies and doing side quests whose contents aren't all that engaging outside of what worldbuilding they do and what they reward. The traversal gets a lot better once you get the first "traversal oriented bot" as early on it is pretty brutal with how slow the tank is even with boost. It was a good design choice to have the boost feature of bots be infinite outside of combat but I'd be lying if I said traversal didn't wear on me when those objectives where nowhere near the fast travel points. There is also a water mechanic. NO WAIT ITS NOT WHAT YOU THINK! It is not for thirst, its actually a heal and if your water bottle is full then its a revive should you die outside of your bot. A bot reaching 0 hp is game over though, no matter how many others you have on your person. The water can be refilled at the various water tanks around the map which is one of your discoverable fast travel point options. There were not many frame drops that I ran into while playing either. I only ever saw them when destroying rocks that blocked grottos, though this game does to the "low framerate mobs when far away" thing which never really bothered me to be honest.
Speaking of side quests, I won't call it a meta game but there's this hub you get early on called Spino. This town starts out with nothing, but as you do side quests they usually end with you telling someone "Hey, this town need people. Why don't you come on down?". This gets the town to grow and become more developed, get more facilities and upgrade said facilities so you can in turn upgrade your bots and just give people with nowhere to go a nice place to live in this harsh sandy land. It reminds me of building up colony 9 in Xenoblade Chronicles. Most side quests leading to "Come toBrazil Spino!" however is part of the reason why they aren't so engaging, the other being their standard side quests gameplay of "get this thing" or "find this person" or "kill this dinosaur" which is also not very captivating. I was doing them for what I got out it not because it was more game to play. You also gain access to a customizable room that you can decorate with furnishings you either buy, craft or find and can even put your bots in them which can also be expanded in size. I am not someone who really cares about interior design so I didn't spend much time on it and can't tell you if its good or bad. If you played Yakuza 8, its similar to the room you have on Dondoko Island.
Combat is generally pretty simple but it also tests your threat assessment abilities and if you've been keeping your bots of choice up to snuff. Generally though it boils down to driving around the encounter and taking shots at the enemy bots and using secondary weapons to pick off the foot soldiers as well as shooting down their missiles. You also need to suspend your disbelief because this game does the whole "The MCs don't kill, everyone they ever fought survived being shot by a tank cannon at point blank range and/or survived their bot exploding into a ball of fire". I'll give the game this though, you see the foot soldier enemies either have the dizzy stars or run away after to take down their hp fully (animals seems to actually die though, fuck their lives I guess) but I call bullshit on the ones in the bots. This also makes the times when the game talks about death to hit a lot more than it should which took me aback each time. Story based boss fights are different story as they have their phases the go in and out of and as you would expect, require a bit more actual ability to lead your shots than an normal encounter as they can be very mobile because yes this game asks that as well as having bullet drop for things like the tank cannon. There is also out of bot combat and Beelzebub is no slouch in that regard. He has his light and heavy attacks which as you should expect and the latter can be charged. Pressing heavy after a light will change the combo ender plus he can do ariel combos and the previous combo rules apply. My favorite was the 5 hit with the heavy ender which makes Beelzebub do that Chun Li super move, Tenshokyaku. Not only that, he can dodge cancel attacks even in the air. I LOVE DODGE CANCELING! Him along with the party have abilities they can use with Beelzebub having a meter and his party having cooldowns but otherwise your party will be fighting on their own. Rao has some moves for an old man, I gotta say.
I've brought up bots a lot so I'll get into them now. There are many different bots although there is some overlap between their unique function and those that overlap seem to have one lean more towards combat and the other traversal. If I wasn't doing every side quest as they appeared they would have been gotten in a reasonable flow. The tank is well, a tank. It is slow but has a lot of health, does fantastic damage with its main cannon and will be your bread and butter more than likely though my personal favorite is the Battle Armor and its goofy style punches. Other bots are made to jump high, traverse over unsolid ground, move items or just be a fast traversal bot among other things but can be used in battle with no issues. That doesn't sound like a lot sure but coupled with the overlap, you're coming up close to 20 different bots you can build and upgrade. Yes this does mean this is a game where you're better off engaging in every encounter if you can as not all materials can be found, some must be crafted with what you have on your person (or I guess demon). I am not someone who upgrades anything and everything, only what I use, so I never had an issue with not having materials unless they physically were not obtainable yet at that point in the game. It seems to be the game's way of limiting your power, though it feels like anything that is under your level scales to you (everything in the first Sand Land map was level 18 like I was when I went back for cleanup) while things that were set above stay that way until you out level them (I ran into level 20's when I wanted to go to a previously unexplored map section when I was level 15).
Even with knowing going in that the bots were a large part of the game, I was still surprised with just how much you could do with the upgrading and customization. Each bot has a different amount of parts they can equip and each individual part can be upgraded but using the tank as an example you can change and upgrade the primary and secondary weapons, body, suspension, engine, option (bonus feature, in the tanks case something like extra armor) and then 2 chip slots for bonuses. Each one of these will change the visuals for that part of the tank, not all are unique but there's several different looks you will see. Not only will they change physically, and stats wise, which should be a given, but after a certain point in the game you can customize the paint on your bots and depending on your bot you can have a lot of things to paint as some weapons have multiple color sections you can adjust. There are also several slots for decals with rotation and size options and you can adjust the metallic and glossy finishes on each individual parts. I gave my tank the angry face with sharp teeth look, some Pteranodon emblems and made it black and white. This does cost paint to do each time so its not free, and you can unlock more colors by doing some side quests. I did not see any way to transmog parts so those of you weirdos who put aesthetics above stats will need to either deal with being underpowered, hope you find a stronger version of that part you like or upgrade that part with materials.
This was honestly a type of game that on paper I should not have enjoyed as I am pretty staunch in my stance of "traversal is generally the worst part of large map/open world games". Until the first traversal style bot is build, going around the map was a chore and I recommend not trying to do too much exploring until you get one. Combat while simple is still engaging enough due to the customizable builds of the bots and ability to make them your own with colors and decals, along with out of bot combat being fun as well. The activities could use more variety to them with more worthwhile rewards other than materials 99% of the time but at least fast travel points are plentiful once discovered. The story is by the numbers at every turn and even with enjoying the main cast, it was really Toriyama's art that did the lifting for me which is how I felt after reading the manga. I don't know why this game was giving me such a hard time to track down but I think it was worth the effort. Rest In Peace, Akira Toriyama. I'm glad more of your work is finally getting attention.
Akira Toriyama's work was one of my main gateways into anime back in the day, with DBZ's ocean dub because I'm that fucking old. His artstyle is something I will always enjoy its why I played games like Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest that to this day I think is such a standout in the genre. I'm glad another of his works is getting adapted in game form. I think his artstyle translated well in game, especially in terms of the bots (the machines you use throughout the game). That man really loved drawing vehicles and machines and it shows, especially since Sand Land's inception was because he just wanted to draw an old man with a tank which grew into something he never intended it to. Yes some characters I could see the "building blocks" and traits shared from his other work (I will always see Mr. Satan when I see that long square jaw) but his creature designs are also in full effect with giant cats with sabre teeth, dinosaurs with weird tails and prominent back and head spines, large toothed Pteranodons etc, they stand out even if the designs in game get re-used quite a bit with as much as a pallet swap and maybe one slight addition like a head piece to differentiate unless its a boss. There was also a design that was outright used in OG Dragon Ball that I was happy to see. There isn't as much to say about the style of the environments other than they look good and accurately reflect what they're named, Sand Land is very much a land of sand but I am grateful that it is not the only type of scenery available all throughout the game.
The story of the first half of the game mostly follows the manga, two demons venture out with an old man in a tank to find water, but some parts have had their order changed or elongated and there were brand new things added to what I assume more organically bridge into the second half which is entirely new. As I said in the intro, I read the manga but I did not watch the anime which I'm sure this new stuff is covered there. One of the notable new things added to the first half is the new party member, Ann. Originally it was just Rao, Beelzebub (who you play as) and Thief but she joins as the resident gearhead and a more organic style reason why the characters can get more bots because the manga was ONLY the tank. Well that is technically not true. Rao had a car but in the manga when it gets ruined it doesn't get fixed unlike in the game. I did enjoy the main group and think Ann was a great addition, though I can't say they aren't predictable as characters. Aside from a couple of the villains, the ones you spend the most of the time fighting against, I can't say I share the same feelings towards. They are just as basic, not that its a bad thing but it leads to some disengaging of interest in the narrative when I can predict every single plot beat introduced in the post manga content. I'm not saying I was expecting some Yoko Taro or Kojima level narrative and Sand land's is by no means bad, it just didn't do enough to make the predictability engaging. What you think is going to happen after reading the synopsis, is more than likely what will happen. The voice acting is hit or miss with I think Rao having the worst of it which is bad because he is one of the main characters with more of the important lines. I feel like they were going for the "battle hardened, tired old man has seen some shit" route but he is mostly so monotone it comes off as disinterested and doesn't match the character's emotion that is portrayed by the model's animations a lot of the time. Most other named characters were either good or fine but outside of the actual cutscenes, the stilted line reading that is common in this style of game makes even VA's like Kira Buckland (Ann's VA) unable to reach the levels we know they can. The dialogue that occurred during traversal also repeated a lot, and I mean A LOT. The dialogue updates after story beats but I heard the same line of dialogue three times on average when exploring ruins or doing story based dungeons. Its not as if they're allergic to dead air because there's plenty of times without it but other times they talk like its some first party sony game giving you a hint every 10 seconds. "We could get up here, if we had a bot that could jump" Beelzebub says as I am JUMPING IN THE JUMP BOT. This happens every time. I was also surprised that I enjoyed the music. Make no mistake you get plenty of "Desert Music" but the tracks that play specifically in the dungeons and towns at night were pretty beautiful.
So how's the gameplay then? Does it carry it if the narrative is as standard as I say? Depends. Do you like driving around? Because you will be doing A LOT of that. I would say 75% of the game was me driving a bot across the maps and doing various activities. There's grotto's to explore, hills to jump up (the game calls them hills but they're more like tall rock formations), field bosses to fight, bases to raid where some are stealth based and others are combat, ruins to explore and radio towers to fix, bounties and races. Those radio towers are not something you have to climb don't worry, and their requirement to fix might as well be non existent with how little you need and how plentiful those resources are as never once did I have to take a leave and come back to fix it and yes it does populate the map with undiscovered activities in the area. The grottos are just these small single room caves that have chests or ore deposits, maybe an enemy or two inside and sometimes need rocks destroyed to access. The hills are these tall rock formations that usually have a group of enemies you should defeat before jumping to the top and getting the treasure or ore deposits. Treasure chests have either materials or parts for the bots in them with the latter being in the large variant of chests. Ruins are generally larger than the grottos and sometimes have multiple entrances. Going through them you'll run into enemies, platforming challenges, and destructible rocks while you look for chests and ore deposits where both tend to be exclusive materials which in my case was assorted coins and old variants of metals. Unless I was just being blind, which is possible, the ruins always seemed to just...end. There wasn't really a noticeable "end point" or even a boss outside of specific mission based circumstances. It made them feel pretty limp, I'll be honest. The field bosses are differently designed but larger versions of the dinosaurs, panthers and crocs who's movesets aren't much different from their grunt counterparts. The human bosses are strictly from missions and have a lot more going for them than their animal counterparts or underlings. They are not just palette swaps with basic gear on their bots like what you find in the field, they have unique or specific optional parts for their bots to make the fights a bit more interesting such as emp mines, large missile packs or a grapple that then shoves 4 drills in you for massive damage.
If you aren't doing those then your time is spent driving around in whatever bot of your choice (until you need to swap for a specific feature one has), grabbing materials so you can upgrade your bots, finding fast travel points, shooting enemies and doing side quests whose contents aren't all that engaging outside of what worldbuilding they do and what they reward. The traversal gets a lot better once you get the first "traversal oriented bot" as early on it is pretty brutal with how slow the tank is even with boost. It was a good design choice to have the boost feature of bots be infinite outside of combat but I'd be lying if I said traversal didn't wear on me when those objectives where nowhere near the fast travel points. There is also a water mechanic. NO WAIT ITS NOT WHAT YOU THINK! It is not for thirst, its actually a heal and if your water bottle is full then its a revive should you die outside of your bot. A bot reaching 0 hp is game over though, no matter how many others you have on your person. The water can be refilled at the various water tanks around the map which is one of your discoverable fast travel point options. There were not many frame drops that I ran into while playing either. I only ever saw them when destroying rocks that blocked grottos, though this game does to the "low framerate mobs when far away" thing which never really bothered me to be honest.
Speaking of side quests, I won't call it a meta game but there's this hub you get early on called Spino. This town starts out with nothing, but as you do side quests they usually end with you telling someone "Hey, this town need people. Why don't you come on down?". This gets the town to grow and become more developed, get more facilities and upgrade said facilities so you can in turn upgrade your bots and just give people with nowhere to go a nice place to live in this harsh sandy land. It reminds me of building up colony 9 in Xenoblade Chronicles. Most side quests leading to "Come to
Combat is generally pretty simple but it also tests your threat assessment abilities and if you've been keeping your bots of choice up to snuff. Generally though it boils down to driving around the encounter and taking shots at the enemy bots and using secondary weapons to pick off the foot soldiers as well as shooting down their missiles. You also need to suspend your disbelief because this game does the whole "The MCs don't kill, everyone they ever fought survived being shot by a tank cannon at point blank range and/or survived their bot exploding into a ball of fire". I'll give the game this though, you see the foot soldier enemies either have the dizzy stars or run away after to take down their hp fully (animals seems to actually die though, fuck their lives I guess) but I call bullshit on the ones in the bots. This also makes the times when the game talks about death to hit a lot more than it should which took me aback each time. Story based boss fights are different story as they have their phases the go in and out of and as you would expect, require a bit more actual ability to lead your shots than an normal encounter as they can be very mobile because yes this game asks that as well as having bullet drop for things like the tank cannon. There is also out of bot combat and Beelzebub is no slouch in that regard. He has his light and heavy attacks which as you should expect and the latter can be charged. Pressing heavy after a light will change the combo ender plus he can do ariel combos and the previous combo rules apply. My favorite was the 5 hit with the heavy ender which makes Beelzebub do that Chun Li super move, Tenshokyaku. Not only that, he can dodge cancel attacks even in the air. I LOVE DODGE CANCELING! Him along with the party have abilities they can use with Beelzebub having a meter and his party having cooldowns but otherwise your party will be fighting on their own. Rao has some moves for an old man, I gotta say.
I've brought up bots a lot so I'll get into them now. There are many different bots although there is some overlap between their unique function and those that overlap seem to have one lean more towards combat and the other traversal. If I wasn't doing every side quest as they appeared they would have been gotten in a reasonable flow. The tank is well, a tank. It is slow but has a lot of health, does fantastic damage with its main cannon and will be your bread and butter more than likely though my personal favorite is the Battle Armor and its goofy style punches. Other bots are made to jump high, traverse over unsolid ground, move items or just be a fast traversal bot among other things but can be used in battle with no issues. That doesn't sound like a lot sure but coupled with the overlap, you're coming up close to 20 different bots you can build and upgrade. Yes this does mean this is a game where you're better off engaging in every encounter if you can as not all materials can be found, some must be crafted with what you have on your person (or I guess demon). I am not someone who upgrades anything and everything, only what I use, so I never had an issue with not having materials unless they physically were not obtainable yet at that point in the game. It seems to be the game's way of limiting your power, though it feels like anything that is under your level scales to you (everything in the first Sand Land map was level 18 like I was when I went back for cleanup) while things that were set above stay that way until you out level them (I ran into level 20's when I wanted to go to a previously unexplored map section when I was level 15).
Even with knowing going in that the bots were a large part of the game, I was still surprised with just how much you could do with the upgrading and customization. Each bot has a different amount of parts they can equip and each individual part can be upgraded but using the tank as an example you can change and upgrade the primary and secondary weapons, body, suspension, engine, option (bonus feature, in the tanks case something like extra armor) and then 2 chip slots for bonuses. Each one of these will change the visuals for that part of the tank, not all are unique but there's several different looks you will see. Not only will they change physically, and stats wise, which should be a given, but after a certain point in the game you can customize the paint on your bots and depending on your bot you can have a lot of things to paint as some weapons have multiple color sections you can adjust. There are also several slots for decals with rotation and size options and you can adjust the metallic and glossy finishes on each individual parts. I gave my tank the angry face with sharp teeth look, some Pteranodon emblems and made it black and white. This does cost paint to do each time so its not free, and you can unlock more colors by doing some side quests. I did not see any way to transmog parts so those of you weirdos who put aesthetics above stats will need to either deal with being underpowered, hope you find a stronger version of that part you like or upgrade that part with materials.
This was honestly a type of game that on paper I should not have enjoyed as I am pretty staunch in my stance of "traversal is generally the worst part of large map/open world games". Until the first traversal style bot is build, going around the map was a chore and I recommend not trying to do too much exploring until you get one. Combat while simple is still engaging enough due to the customizable builds of the bots and ability to make them your own with colors and decals, along with out of bot combat being fun as well. The activities could use more variety to them with more worthwhile rewards other than materials 99% of the time but at least fast travel points are plentiful once discovered. The story is by the numbers at every turn and even with enjoying the main cast, it was really Toriyama's art that did the lifting for me which is how I felt after reading the manga. I don't know why this game was giving me such a hard time to track down but I think it was worth the effort. Rest In Peace, Akira Toriyama. I'm glad more of your work is finally getting attention.
Sonic Labyrinth
1995
Labyrinth, come in.
You beat the allegations, my boy. The worst Sonic game allegations, that is. I’m not sure how I should feel about the fact that I had a somewhat decent time playing this game. I played it as a kid and must have never made it past the 2nd stage and all I remember is it feeling SLOW and AWFUL and I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON. Which seemed to be the general consensus among players.
Believe it or not, a big motivation to make me finally throw away the money for Sonic Origins Plus was to have another go at these Game Gear games that haunted me on Mega Collection Plus as a kid, as well as the ones that weren’t included there. When I opened up the menu for them, the first thing that caught my eye was the critically acclaimed masterpiece in question, and you know what? It was alright!!! ?? Bit of a stretch maybe. It certainly was not <good> but it was by no means awful neither.
Laughable story premise aside, Sonic is actually kinda fun to control here? I’m not fucking joking. Slow as shit means spin dash encouraged, and you can go real zoomy zoomy, it’s a satisfying challenge to cancel it at the right time. As a speedrun this could be fun as heck I’m tellin’ ya, the most fun I had here were the couple times where I had just grabbed all the keys and had a small amount of time to bolt it towards the goal. I think if the game was built fully around this concept it could have found a real decent identity.
But this is Sonic LABYRINTH, and hence the levels are LABYRINTHs, with doors taking you to all sorts of places, you gotta keep track of where you’re going, kinda fun right? Like a puzzle or a maze?? NO. This actually describes the level design for about 3 of the 12 regular stages, the rest is just random pointless BS. In general it just feels aimless; questionable teleporters, pointless powerups with straight up bad placement, strange enemies that do not look like they should be in a sonic game (truthfully they do kind of fit I just think this one is really funny), and bosses that really could have been much better had someone but a just a little bit more thought into them.
That said it is mostly just aimless, and not frustrating. The only exceptions being one fuck off hidden platform in 3-3, and the general map in 4-3. I mean f*cking look at this. I understand the vision with this final level to be honest, you gave us our Sonic Labyrinth but it’s just jarring without some semblance of a difficulty curve to precede it. You went from somewhat maze-like levels, to aimless bs, to the world’s most complicated stage that feels like a puzzle in itself trying to figure out where to go even when it’s right in front of you. My mate said we should do a drinking game where we play that level without looking at the map and take a drink everytime you go through a door and I admit that sounds like the best worst time and ohohohohhh I am tempted!!
There is the matter of the true ending being a little obtuse but I forgive that because it added a slight layer of replayability with the hint given at the end. That said, it's still hilariously shallow.
The take home today is that I think the game actually has a solid foundation and controls well, it's just mostly ruined by a number of horrible design decisions that scream like the developers did not give any shits whatsoever. Therefore since it's a Sonic game with “good ideas”, it's actually 5 stars and the most underrated game ever and you guys just don't get it you don't see the vision open your mind for once…
Except it doesn’t have many good ideas, it’s just a worse Sonic 3D Blast.
(Maybe more like a prototype, since this came out first, hm!)
You beat the allegations, my boy. The worst Sonic game allegations, that is. I’m not sure how I should feel about the fact that I had a somewhat decent time playing this game. I played it as a kid and must have never made it past the 2nd stage and all I remember is it feeling SLOW and AWFUL and I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON. Which seemed to be the general consensus among players.
Believe it or not, a big motivation to make me finally throw away the money for Sonic Origins Plus was to have another go at these Game Gear games that haunted me on Mega Collection Plus as a kid, as well as the ones that weren’t included there. When I opened up the menu for them, the first thing that caught my eye was the critically acclaimed masterpiece in question, and you know what? It was alright!!! ?? Bit of a stretch maybe. It certainly was not <good> but it was by no means awful neither.
Laughable story premise aside, Sonic is actually kinda fun to control here? I’m not fucking joking. Slow as shit means spin dash encouraged, and you can go real zoomy zoomy, it’s a satisfying challenge to cancel it at the right time. As a speedrun this could be fun as heck I’m tellin’ ya, the most fun I had here were the couple times where I had just grabbed all the keys and had a small amount of time to bolt it towards the goal. I think if the game was built fully around this concept it could have found a real decent identity.
But this is Sonic LABYRINTH, and hence the levels are LABYRINTHs, with doors taking you to all sorts of places, you gotta keep track of where you’re going, kinda fun right? Like a puzzle or a maze?? NO. This actually describes the level design for about 3 of the 12 regular stages, the rest is just random pointless BS. In general it just feels aimless; questionable teleporters, pointless powerups with straight up bad placement, strange enemies that do not look like they should be in a sonic game (truthfully they do kind of fit I just think this one is really funny), and bosses that really could have been much better had someone but a just a little bit more thought into them.
That said it is mostly just aimless, and not frustrating. The only exceptions being one fuck off hidden platform in 3-3, and the general map in 4-3. I mean f*cking look at this. I understand the vision with this final level to be honest, you gave us our Sonic Labyrinth but it’s just jarring without some semblance of a difficulty curve to precede it. You went from somewhat maze-like levels, to aimless bs, to the world’s most complicated stage that feels like a puzzle in itself trying to figure out where to go even when it’s right in front of you. My mate said we should do a drinking game where we play that level without looking at the map and take a drink everytime you go through a door and I admit that sounds like the best worst time and ohohohohhh I am tempted!!
There is the matter of the true ending being a little obtuse but I forgive that because it added a slight layer of replayability with the hint given at the end. That said, it's still hilariously shallow.
The take home today is that I think the game actually has a solid foundation and controls well, it's just mostly ruined by a number of horrible design decisions that scream like the developers did not give any shits whatsoever. Therefore since it's a Sonic game with “good ideas”, it's actually 5 stars and the most underrated game ever and you guys just don't get it you don't see the vision open your mind for once…
Except it doesn’t have many good ideas, it’s just a worse Sonic 3D Blast.
(Maybe more like a prototype, since this came out first, hm!)
This review contains spoilers
Let me get a rating out of the way first.
ahem
There is a good game somewhere here in this giant steaming pile of shit that is this FF7R trilogy, but I just don't care enough anymore to find it/10.
Edit: Okay, that's a bit harsh. While I do agree with the general sentiment of that statement for a rating, I still want to make clear that I had fun with the game for a majority of the time; it was the ending that really took me completely out of the game.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth expands a lot on what I already liked about the first entry, but at the same time doubles down on the things I hated about the first entry while also showing a complete lack of understanding of basic game design at times. I have a lot to say for the 132 HOURS i spent grinding away at this game, mostly negative. But I do want to say that where there are positives those positives shine bright.
Let's start with the positives, then.
1) I think the main focus of this Remake project has been to bring about the characters of the world and turn the dial so hard it breaks. It really goes to show that this game made me do the impossible; actually liking Yuffie and Cait Sith. They all have their own quirks and goofs about them, and they feel very real and often relatable for moving pixels on a screen. The only exception to this is Cid as he feels a bit more civilised for seemingly no reason, but I feel like they're saving him more for the third part so I'm not all that mad about it.
2) I already thought the combat system in Remake was the best combat system Square Enix has ever put out, but they somehow managed to outdo that. The synergy system feels like a very natural addition to the combat system, and it feels perfectly integrated as well. We FINALLY have a form of aerial combat for all characters too. I remember in chapter 3 of Remake, there was a side quest where Cloud and Tifa were fighting Drakes in the abandoned warehouse outside Sector 7, and it was such a slog to kill them with the very limited magic and lack of abilities at that early point in the game, but now everything feels 50 million times smoother in combat.
3) Having a bit of a musical background, I am a SUCKER for music direction. I believe firmly that music in a game brings so much more emotional weight to even the most forgettable scenes. One can and will associate music to core memories. The Remake project took probably my favorite soundtrack in all of gaming and broke the dial again while trying to turn it up. What's even crazier is hearing songs from Remake be remixed in Rebirth and still being amazing, such as being in the desert area outside of Kalm towards Midgar. They brought back the dynamic music changes too from changing from the overworld to combat, and somehow managed to make every track a banger. I can't wait for the music for this game to come to DSPs (or maybe I should start using my SoundCloud account again, I don't know).
4) The side quests in Remake were nothing burgers meant solely to pad out the game, but at least in Rebirth they're nothing burgers with a side of ketchup. I guess that's a positive? I'm partly kidding here. In terms of purely the content of them, the side quests for the most part are still nothing burgers in this game, but the main standout to them now are the fact that now all side quests except for the last one are tied to a specific party member. Not only does each side quest give you a little insight as to how each character has or will have interacted with the world. I guess it's moreso of a strength of the strong character writing of the game rather than the side quests themselves, but I think it speaks volumes that I was actively trying to seek out doing all the side quests in each region.
5) QUEEN'S BLOOD!!!! Sure, by the later stages of the game I wanted to pull my hair out strand by strand due to how difficult it was getting, but that could probably be attributed to me trying to brute force the same deck into everything. Still, I did manage to beat everyone in the in game world at it in due time, and I can honestly say this probably tops Triple Triad from Final Fantasy VIII. Square Enix, it would be a literal money printer if you decided to make this a real card game.
6) I was critical of Remake's absolute obliteration of Sephiroth's characterization. He was littered every 30 minutes of the game past chapter 1. In Rebirth, this is the part of the game where Sephiroth starts to make more of an appearance so I guess I was okay with the fact that he appears a lot in this game. Still, I can appreciate that they managed to dial down all the cryptic messaging for once and actually use Sephiroth in scenarios that actually make sense, even if he never was meant to be in a scene in the first place. For example, I liked when a hallucination of Sephiroth was able to instill the idea that the Tifa we'd been playing as this entire time was a fake in Cloud's mind in the Inn when she asks him to talk with her in private. If he had instead just showed up and blabbered about some Reunion shit I probably would have just refunded the game then and there since it was that early on.
And that concludes all of the nice things I have to say about this game. Not a lot, sure, but when this game has its moments it's usually due to one of these factors.
Now I'm gonna rant like crazy.
1) This is a minor nitpick if anything, but I'm not a huge fan of the Telltale style romance system in this game. It ruins any sense of surprise as to who you end up going on a date with. In Remake and in the original game, this stat was entirely hidden from you and you wouldn't be able to tell who you would go out with. Now with just the click of a button you can see who you're most into it with, which is only very slightly jarring but still something that ticked me off.
2) Another group of minor nitpicks here, It feels kind of weird to me that every major town in this game has major hordes of happy go lucky NPCs running around everywhere. Even Cosmo Canyon, a place that's supposed to be a sacred place for planetologists to come together and study under Bugenhagen, has fallen victim to the tourism industry. I wouldn't have as much of a problem with this if they didn't make it so you can't enter any of the houses in the towns (the exceptions being Gongaga and Nibelheim, which makes me wonder that if they got it right towards the end why they couldn't do it in the beginning). But that's just me nitpicking environments that are ultimately just pixels on a screen.
3) Probably the biggest thing I was excited for about Rebirth was the open world they'd make, especially with how much the devs were hyping it up as something to immerse yourself in. Sure enough, it's a VAST improvement over the likes of something like FFXV or FFXVI. If there was anything from this "hate" list I would move up to the "like" list, it would be this. But alas there are several major problems I have with the open world. Probably my biggest issue with this is that I believe in open world games, exploration exists beyond communication towers, quest markers on a map, and a giant navigation bar on the top of the UI telling you where to go. It sucks that in 2024 we're getting 2014 Ubislop levels of open world design. This isn't exploration; this is crossing off a checklist. What makes this checklist feeling worse is that most of the activities in the world map involve you just going to a place in bumfuck nowhere to hit QTEs for shitcoins so that Chadley can constantly call your phone and say the most annoying things ever. God, I want to rip out all of Chadley's ass hairs individually, if he even has any. Anyway, each activity you do in the world creates a new location for you to fast travel to, as if the 8 Chocobo Stops and the handful of Cache Locations in any given region weren't enough for that. Finally, I know a lot of people online would get up in arms over this, but I'm not a huge fan of slathering yellow paint on climbable objects in games and/or having protruding ledges telling you where to climb, which Rebirth is guilty of both of those.
4) Minigames. Oh, minigames. At first, I thought it was okay that there were over 100 minigames in the game since they're all mostly optional and if you want you can just skip them. I say mostly here. Maybe it's my fault that the completionist in me wanted to do every single one of them, but I think it's a problem that the game relegates certain story sections to specifically minigames. Costa del Sol did NOT need to be filled to the brim with them, even if it is a resort. I'm at Costa del Sol to catch some tans and meet up with Professor Hojo, not shoot targets with a gun. I'm at the beach, not a carnival. It got to the point that when I got to the Gold Saucer, the area that was for the most contained of all the mini games in the original game and is marketed as that in the promotion for this game, I couldn't really care because at some point it felt like the entire world was the Gold Saucer. What's even crazy is that there are entire mini games just relegated to a single side quest, like the mushroom picking one in Gongaga. This game is henceforth called "Final Fantasy VII ReCarnival".
5) Ever since the ending of Remake and the foreshadowing it created that things were going to be different from here on out, you would think that they would go all out with such a theme. And I'm not entirely against the idea of them doing something different on top of something that already existed; I think that shit's cool if anything, even if I preferred if they didn't in this particular case. Rather, I'm more critical of how they go about changing things and how they went about telling the player that they were changing things. I didn't think Remake needed Chapter 18 to be what it was and also think it was horribly executed, but I got what I paid for and went with it. What it did set up, however, was the idea that the sky is the limit with how they go about tweaking things, to the point where possibly the most talked about scene in gaming history is now considered a spoiler.
For the first half of Rebirth, the changes to the game's story are very minimal, some of which I find as good changes others not so much. For example, I think the change of making Yuffie the victim of drowning in Under Junon instead of Priscilla given that Yuffie is now a mandatory character is great. Other changes like making Cloud the captain of the troops in the Inauguration Parade rub me the wrong way but aren't something to lose sleep over. Finally there are other changes like showing Sephiroth appear on the scene and kill the Midgardsormr in front of the party that I just can't really defend and would prefer if they kept it the way it was in the original.
The second half of the game, however, is when the changes they make really start to come in, and this is where a lot of my being okay with changes ends. It almost kind of seemed like "subtlety" is a banned word at Square Enix offices. If the devs knew that they were adapting a scene fans had already liked, it's like they had the notion to just add as much noise as possible to that scene. For example, I am not a fan of the way the Barret and Dyne scene was handled. What sequence of events would you rather have?
A) Get greeted by dead bodies on the floor with bullet wounds in them, get sent to prison, leave the prison, catch up with Barret, find out the truth that Barret didn't do it and it was in fact Dyne, watch Dyne commit suicide, and then do a Chocobo race to win your freedom.
Or, B) Have Barret see a gun-armed man in the distance, have the rest of the party get greeted by dead bodies on the floor with bullet wounds in them, get told you have 24 hours to find the real culprit, get into the prison, do a bunch of minigames to get to the Chocobo race, leave the prison by winning the Chocobo race, find Barret and Dyne, learn that Dyne is a mutant freak who can attach metal to his arm out of thin air, have Shinra troops ambush Dyne and kill him, and finally have a Palmer boss fight that was so out of place given that they had cut Rocket Town I felt like punching a hole through my monitor? (By the way, I'm okay with them cutting Rocket Town in this game so long as they can justify it in Part 3).
Do you see my point? There's just a lot of times in the story, moreso in the second part, where the writers in their hubris just add a whole lot of nothing to an already popular scene that didn't need anything extra at all, especially the ending for this game, which I'll touch on next.
6) Here's the doozy. FUCK. THIS. ENDING! I had so many theories as to what they could do with this game, but this ending was NOT one of them. They singlehandedly ruined the ONE scene that was integral to Final Fantasy VII. If you wanted a world where Aerith dies like I did, you got it. If you're a crazed character shipper who wanted a world where Aerith lives, you got it. Unfortunately, this ending has put me in a position of feeling absolutely nothing; I'm now in a world where I don't care anymore. This ending pisses me off entirely for 3 reasons.
A) I usually hate plots that revolve around multiverses, because it becomes very easy to just replace characters, removing any sort of stakes from the narrative equation. If John Doe from universe A dies, no one's stopping the crew in universe A from bringing back John Doe from universe B who has the exact same personality and characteristics and acting as if nothing happened. So far, with the writing that's already been put in stone, it seems we already have something of the sort. I was already apprehensive of the fact that in Remake they somehow managed to bring Zack back to life knowing that it was in an alternate timeline, but until now it was relegated to just that; an alternate timeline that I couldn't care in the slightest about. Now they've officially opened the door to bringing Zack into the main world, and it's seemingly already happened. What's stopping the writers from just bringing Aerith back from another world, since the Aerith we've seen from another world was just more of the same we've had the entire game? Oh wait, they did bring Aerith back for the final boss fight. And Aerith does show up right there at the final frame before the credits roll (granted, I think this is more of Cloud hallucinating her into the frame, but only time will tell). They can't have their social media star die on us! No, no, no! What makes it even worse is that the black and white materias are officially stated to be from other worlds, meaning the writers can and will add complete random shit from out of their asses and just say "oh it's from another world".
B) Aerith's death is supposed to be the one scene from the game that shows the finality of life. It's fickle. You don't know when and how it's going to end and how it'll affect everyone around you. Even despite how sad it feels, you still have to carry on with the lost's legacy in tow. The original game exemplifies this perfectly; you reach the Forgotten Capital (which, by the way, I'm also SUPER pissed they didn't make it a proper city and instead relegated to making the Temple of the Ancients the city and the actual Capital into just a narrow hallway. I would have really loved to hear a final rendition of You Can Hear The Cries Of The Planet in essence of what we got with the Seven Second Till The End bit at the end of Remake), see Aerith praying there, only for her to get impaled and then immediately fighting Jenova, burying her body in the water, and then moving along towards the Northern Crater. Now, with Rebirth, remember how I said "subtlety" is a banned word at Square Enix offices? In the Forgotten Capital, you get to see Cloud disarm Sephiroth before killing her, only for it to just instantly cut to showing Sephiroth having impaled her because "world jumps" or whatever multiversal bullshit that instantly takes out any emotion from the scene, a 3 phase Jenova fight which is fine I guess but it begs the question of if they're really staying true to the original if it isn't catching the same emotional beats, and then like 50 gajillion phases of a Sephiroth boss fight where you fight alongside Zack and Aerith, who should be LONG DEAD by this point, but some multiversal chicanery dictates them to be in the scene. It's all some real fucking bullshit I could not care for anymore. What makes it even worse is that we don't see the water burial anymore, instead it's just implied that it happened but we can't truly say goodbye to Aerith just yet, no no no! NOT the Square Enix social media star!
C) Whatever they're cooking for the sequence in Mideel where Cloud falls into the Lifestream and regains his memory, they've gotta have to pack at least 3 different Lifestreams to get that man's memory up and running again. This man's brain is COOKED. The worst part is it doesn't need to be this way at all. There was a power in knowing seeing Cloud and Tifa come to terms about what happened in Nibelheim. Now Cloud has to come to terms with the fact that Aerith is dead, some shit revolving around Zack since apparently now he knows who Zack is since that was just randomly revealed in the return to Nibelheim, AND his true identity. The ending creates a GIANT mess inside Cloud's brain, and it all could have been avoided if they didn't add all this noise to a very popular scene. There's a charm in subtlety, and these writers just seemingly forgot that.
Conclusion
Overall, there are higher highs and MUCH lower lows than the first game in this Remake series. This leaves me with a much more sour taste in my mouth than the first game did, however, to the point where I don't see myself actually buying the third part until I read up on all the spoilers and listen to/watch fan reactions. Though, that just might be me writing this still angry that I had to sit through that ending not even a mere few hours ago. This is probably the first time I've genuinely felt hollowness and somewhat of an ambivalence over a game, even if I did find myself enjoying a lot of what it had to offer. I'm sorry, Remake project, but you've officially lost the plot.
ahem
There is a good game somewhere here in this giant steaming pile of shit that is this FF7R trilogy, but I just don't care enough anymore to find it/10.
Edit: Okay, that's a bit harsh. While I do agree with the general sentiment of that statement for a rating, I still want to make clear that I had fun with the game for a majority of the time; it was the ending that really took me completely out of the game.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth expands a lot on what I already liked about the first entry, but at the same time doubles down on the things I hated about the first entry while also showing a complete lack of understanding of basic game design at times. I have a lot to say for the 132 HOURS i spent grinding away at this game, mostly negative. But I do want to say that where there are positives those positives shine bright.
Let's start with the positives, then.
1) I think the main focus of this Remake project has been to bring about the characters of the world and turn the dial so hard it breaks. It really goes to show that this game made me do the impossible; actually liking Yuffie and Cait Sith. They all have their own quirks and goofs about them, and they feel very real and often relatable for moving pixels on a screen. The only exception to this is Cid as he feels a bit more civilised for seemingly no reason, but I feel like they're saving him more for the third part so I'm not all that mad about it.
2) I already thought the combat system in Remake was the best combat system Square Enix has ever put out, but they somehow managed to outdo that. The synergy system feels like a very natural addition to the combat system, and it feels perfectly integrated as well. We FINALLY have a form of aerial combat for all characters too. I remember in chapter 3 of Remake, there was a side quest where Cloud and Tifa were fighting Drakes in the abandoned warehouse outside Sector 7, and it was such a slog to kill them with the very limited magic and lack of abilities at that early point in the game, but now everything feels 50 million times smoother in combat.
3) Having a bit of a musical background, I am a SUCKER for music direction. I believe firmly that music in a game brings so much more emotional weight to even the most forgettable scenes. One can and will associate music to core memories. The Remake project took probably my favorite soundtrack in all of gaming and broke the dial again while trying to turn it up. What's even crazier is hearing songs from Remake be remixed in Rebirth and still being amazing, such as being in the desert area outside of Kalm towards Midgar. They brought back the dynamic music changes too from changing from the overworld to combat, and somehow managed to make every track a banger. I can't wait for the music for this game to come to DSPs (or maybe I should start using my SoundCloud account again, I don't know).
4) The side quests in Remake were nothing burgers meant solely to pad out the game, but at least in Rebirth they're nothing burgers with a side of ketchup. I guess that's a positive? I'm partly kidding here. In terms of purely the content of them, the side quests for the most part are still nothing burgers in this game, but the main standout to them now are the fact that now all side quests except for the last one are tied to a specific party member. Not only does each side quest give you a little insight as to how each character has or will have interacted with the world. I guess it's moreso of a strength of the strong character writing of the game rather than the side quests themselves, but I think it speaks volumes that I was actively trying to seek out doing all the side quests in each region.
5) QUEEN'S BLOOD!!!! Sure, by the later stages of the game I wanted to pull my hair out strand by strand due to how difficult it was getting, but that could probably be attributed to me trying to brute force the same deck into everything. Still, I did manage to beat everyone in the in game world at it in due time, and I can honestly say this probably tops Triple Triad from Final Fantasy VIII. Square Enix, it would be a literal money printer if you decided to make this a real card game.
6) I was critical of Remake's absolute obliteration of Sephiroth's characterization. He was littered every 30 minutes of the game past chapter 1. In Rebirth, this is the part of the game where Sephiroth starts to make more of an appearance so I guess I was okay with the fact that he appears a lot in this game. Still, I can appreciate that they managed to dial down all the cryptic messaging for once and actually use Sephiroth in scenarios that actually make sense, even if he never was meant to be in a scene in the first place. For example, I liked when a hallucination of Sephiroth was able to instill the idea that the Tifa we'd been playing as this entire time was a fake in Cloud's mind in the Inn when she asks him to talk with her in private. If he had instead just showed up and blabbered about some Reunion shit I probably would have just refunded the game then and there since it was that early on.
And that concludes all of the nice things I have to say about this game. Not a lot, sure, but when this game has its moments it's usually due to one of these factors.
Now I'm gonna rant like crazy.
1) This is a minor nitpick if anything, but I'm not a huge fan of the Telltale style romance system in this game. It ruins any sense of surprise as to who you end up going on a date with. In Remake and in the original game, this stat was entirely hidden from you and you wouldn't be able to tell who you would go out with. Now with just the click of a button you can see who you're most into it with, which is only very slightly jarring but still something that ticked me off.
2) Another group of minor nitpicks here, It feels kind of weird to me that every major town in this game has major hordes of happy go lucky NPCs running around everywhere. Even Cosmo Canyon, a place that's supposed to be a sacred place for planetologists to come together and study under Bugenhagen, has fallen victim to the tourism industry. I wouldn't have as much of a problem with this if they didn't make it so you can't enter any of the houses in the towns (the exceptions being Gongaga and Nibelheim, which makes me wonder that if they got it right towards the end why they couldn't do it in the beginning). But that's just me nitpicking environments that are ultimately just pixels on a screen.
3) Probably the biggest thing I was excited for about Rebirth was the open world they'd make, especially with how much the devs were hyping it up as something to immerse yourself in. Sure enough, it's a VAST improvement over the likes of something like FFXV or FFXVI. If there was anything from this "hate" list I would move up to the "like" list, it would be this. But alas there are several major problems I have with the open world. Probably my biggest issue with this is that I believe in open world games, exploration exists beyond communication towers, quest markers on a map, and a giant navigation bar on the top of the UI telling you where to go. It sucks that in 2024 we're getting 2014 Ubislop levels of open world design. This isn't exploration; this is crossing off a checklist. What makes this checklist feeling worse is that most of the activities in the world map involve you just going to a place in bumfuck nowhere to hit QTEs for shitcoins so that Chadley can constantly call your phone and say the most annoying things ever. God, I want to rip out all of Chadley's ass hairs individually, if he even has any. Anyway, each activity you do in the world creates a new location for you to fast travel to, as if the 8 Chocobo Stops and the handful of Cache Locations in any given region weren't enough for that. Finally, I know a lot of people online would get up in arms over this, but I'm not a huge fan of slathering yellow paint on climbable objects in games and/or having protruding ledges telling you where to climb, which Rebirth is guilty of both of those.
4) Minigames. Oh, minigames. At first, I thought it was okay that there were over 100 minigames in the game since they're all mostly optional and if you want you can just skip them. I say mostly here. Maybe it's my fault that the completionist in me wanted to do every single one of them, but I think it's a problem that the game relegates certain story sections to specifically minigames. Costa del Sol did NOT need to be filled to the brim with them, even if it is a resort. I'm at Costa del Sol to catch some tans and meet up with Professor Hojo, not shoot targets with a gun. I'm at the beach, not a carnival. It got to the point that when I got to the Gold Saucer, the area that was for the most contained of all the mini games in the original game and is marketed as that in the promotion for this game, I couldn't really care because at some point it felt like the entire world was the Gold Saucer. What's even crazy is that there are entire mini games just relegated to a single side quest, like the mushroom picking one in Gongaga. This game is henceforth called "Final Fantasy VII ReCarnival".
5) Ever since the ending of Remake and the foreshadowing it created that things were going to be different from here on out, you would think that they would go all out with such a theme. And I'm not entirely against the idea of them doing something different on top of something that already existed; I think that shit's cool if anything, even if I preferred if they didn't in this particular case. Rather, I'm more critical of how they go about changing things and how they went about telling the player that they were changing things. I didn't think Remake needed Chapter 18 to be what it was and also think it was horribly executed, but I got what I paid for and went with it. What it did set up, however, was the idea that the sky is the limit with how they go about tweaking things, to the point where possibly the most talked about scene in gaming history is now considered a spoiler.
For the first half of Rebirth, the changes to the game's story are very minimal, some of which I find as good changes others not so much. For example, I think the change of making Yuffie the victim of drowning in Under Junon instead of Priscilla given that Yuffie is now a mandatory character is great. Other changes like making Cloud the captain of the troops in the Inauguration Parade rub me the wrong way but aren't something to lose sleep over. Finally there are other changes like showing Sephiroth appear on the scene and kill the Midgardsormr in front of the party that I just can't really defend and would prefer if they kept it the way it was in the original.
The second half of the game, however, is when the changes they make really start to come in, and this is where a lot of my being okay with changes ends. It almost kind of seemed like "subtlety" is a banned word at Square Enix offices. If the devs knew that they were adapting a scene fans had already liked, it's like they had the notion to just add as much noise as possible to that scene. For example, I am not a fan of the way the Barret and Dyne scene was handled. What sequence of events would you rather have?
A) Get greeted by dead bodies on the floor with bullet wounds in them, get sent to prison, leave the prison, catch up with Barret, find out the truth that Barret didn't do it and it was in fact Dyne, watch Dyne commit suicide, and then do a Chocobo race to win your freedom.
Or, B) Have Barret see a gun-armed man in the distance, have the rest of the party get greeted by dead bodies on the floor with bullet wounds in them, get told you have 24 hours to find the real culprit, get into the prison, do a bunch of minigames to get to the Chocobo race, leave the prison by winning the Chocobo race, find Barret and Dyne, learn that Dyne is a mutant freak who can attach metal to his arm out of thin air, have Shinra troops ambush Dyne and kill him, and finally have a Palmer boss fight that was so out of place given that they had cut Rocket Town I felt like punching a hole through my monitor? (By the way, I'm okay with them cutting Rocket Town in this game so long as they can justify it in Part 3).
Do you see my point? There's just a lot of times in the story, moreso in the second part, where the writers in their hubris just add a whole lot of nothing to an already popular scene that didn't need anything extra at all, especially the ending for this game, which I'll touch on next.
6) Here's the doozy. FUCK. THIS. ENDING! I had so many theories as to what they could do with this game, but this ending was NOT one of them. They singlehandedly ruined the ONE scene that was integral to Final Fantasy VII. If you wanted a world where Aerith dies like I did, you got it. If you're a crazed character shipper who wanted a world where Aerith lives, you got it. Unfortunately, this ending has put me in a position of feeling absolutely nothing; I'm now in a world where I don't care anymore. This ending pisses me off entirely for 3 reasons.
A) I usually hate plots that revolve around multiverses, because it becomes very easy to just replace characters, removing any sort of stakes from the narrative equation. If John Doe from universe A dies, no one's stopping the crew in universe A from bringing back John Doe from universe B who has the exact same personality and characteristics and acting as if nothing happened. So far, with the writing that's already been put in stone, it seems we already have something of the sort. I was already apprehensive of the fact that in Remake they somehow managed to bring Zack back to life knowing that it was in an alternate timeline, but until now it was relegated to just that; an alternate timeline that I couldn't care in the slightest about. Now they've officially opened the door to bringing Zack into the main world, and it's seemingly already happened. What's stopping the writers from just bringing Aerith back from another world, since the Aerith we've seen from another world was just more of the same we've had the entire game? Oh wait, they did bring Aerith back for the final boss fight. And Aerith does show up right there at the final frame before the credits roll (granted, I think this is more of Cloud hallucinating her into the frame, but only time will tell). They can't have their social media star die on us! No, no, no! What makes it even worse is that the black and white materias are officially stated to be from other worlds, meaning the writers can and will add complete random shit from out of their asses and just say "oh it's from another world".
B) Aerith's death is supposed to be the one scene from the game that shows the finality of life. It's fickle. You don't know when and how it's going to end and how it'll affect everyone around you. Even despite how sad it feels, you still have to carry on with the lost's legacy in tow. The original game exemplifies this perfectly; you reach the Forgotten Capital (which, by the way, I'm also SUPER pissed they didn't make it a proper city and instead relegated to making the Temple of the Ancients the city and the actual Capital into just a narrow hallway. I would have really loved to hear a final rendition of You Can Hear The Cries Of The Planet in essence of what we got with the Seven Second Till The End bit at the end of Remake), see Aerith praying there, only for her to get impaled and then immediately fighting Jenova, burying her body in the water, and then moving along towards the Northern Crater. Now, with Rebirth, remember how I said "subtlety" is a banned word at Square Enix offices? In the Forgotten Capital, you get to see Cloud disarm Sephiroth before killing her, only for it to just instantly cut to showing Sephiroth having impaled her because "world jumps" or whatever multiversal bullshit that instantly takes out any emotion from the scene, a 3 phase Jenova fight which is fine I guess but it begs the question of if they're really staying true to the original if it isn't catching the same emotional beats, and then like 50 gajillion phases of a Sephiroth boss fight where you fight alongside Zack and Aerith, who should be LONG DEAD by this point, but some multiversal chicanery dictates them to be in the scene. It's all some real fucking bullshit I could not care for anymore. What makes it even worse is that we don't see the water burial anymore, instead it's just implied that it happened but we can't truly say goodbye to Aerith just yet, no no no! NOT the Square Enix social media star!
C) Whatever they're cooking for the sequence in Mideel where Cloud falls into the Lifestream and regains his memory, they've gotta have to pack at least 3 different Lifestreams to get that man's memory up and running again. This man's brain is COOKED. The worst part is it doesn't need to be this way at all. There was a power in knowing seeing Cloud and Tifa come to terms about what happened in Nibelheim. Now Cloud has to come to terms with the fact that Aerith is dead, some shit revolving around Zack since apparently now he knows who Zack is since that was just randomly revealed in the return to Nibelheim, AND his true identity. The ending creates a GIANT mess inside Cloud's brain, and it all could have been avoided if they didn't add all this noise to a very popular scene. There's a charm in subtlety, and these writers just seemingly forgot that.
Conclusion
Overall, there are higher highs and MUCH lower lows than the first game in this Remake series. This leaves me with a much more sour taste in my mouth than the first game did, however, to the point where I don't see myself actually buying the third part until I read up on all the spoilers and listen to/watch fan reactions. Though, that just might be me writing this still angry that I had to sit through that ending not even a mere few hours ago. This is probably the first time I've genuinely felt hollowness and somewhat of an ambivalence over a game, even if I did find myself enjoying a lot of what it had to offer. I'm sorry, Remake project, but you've officially lost the plot.
This review contains spoilers
This game is the definition of whiplash. It's a fantastic action RPG that gets brought down by a ton of poor design choices. For starters the combat is really engaging. I love the fights and all the abilities and how unique the characters are (even if I used Aerith and Tifa for 95% of the game).
What I dislike though is how much content there is. I can hear the cries of people saying that I just want a linear CoD hallway simulator type game. That's not it. I enjoy good side content but this isn't it. It's the same collectathon type bullshit in every area. I feel like I'm playing Assassin's Creed with how many towers I climbed. The amount of minigames in here is also way too much. Did we really need to recycle the motorcycle section from the last game and have 2 tower defenses? And even the side quests that are ok suffer from horrible difficultly balance. Looking at you ultimate party animal. It was definitely a quantity over quality type deal here. It was obvious they were just padding out the length of the game since it's the "middle part".
That brings me to the story. What a crock of horse doodoo. The character stuff is great. I love the characterization we get for everyone and how they interact, that's perfect. What I can't get behind is this multiple timeline mumbo jumbo. We beat Sephiroth 10 times and he's still around. Ghost Aerith is here because Cloud touched alt universe #6 Aerith. If it sounds stupid that's because it is. I'm not some VII purist that thinks this needed to be a 1:1 remake but man what they did here is not it.
Loved the game, wanted to love it more. I can't give it a higher score because of the many issues with it. Hope they do a better job with the last one.
Also fuck you for not making Vincent playable.
What I dislike though is how much content there is. I can hear the cries of people saying that I just want a linear CoD hallway simulator type game. That's not it. I enjoy good side content but this isn't it. It's the same collectathon type bullshit in every area. I feel like I'm playing Assassin's Creed with how many towers I climbed. The amount of minigames in here is also way too much. Did we really need to recycle the motorcycle section from the last game and have 2 tower defenses? And even the side quests that are ok suffer from horrible difficultly balance. Looking at you ultimate party animal. It was definitely a quantity over quality type deal here. It was obvious they were just padding out the length of the game since it's the "middle part".
That brings me to the story. What a crock of horse doodoo. The character stuff is great. I love the characterization we get for everyone and how they interact, that's perfect. What I can't get behind is this multiple timeline mumbo jumbo. We beat Sephiroth 10 times and he's still around. Ghost Aerith is here because Cloud touched alt universe #6 Aerith. If it sounds stupid that's because it is. I'm not some VII purist that thinks this needed to be a 1:1 remake but man what they did here is not it.
Loved the game, wanted to love it more. I can't give it a higher score because of the many issues with it. Hope they do a better job with the last one.
Also fuck you for not making Vincent playable.
I haven't been this conflicted on a game in a while. On one side of the coin, Rebirth continues to do what I loved about Remake. This world gets to be fleshed out and fully realized with this generation's tech and budget, seeing all of these locations and sights on a more personal and intimate scale than anything the original PS1 title could ever hope to accomplish; what was once an abstraction through a big region map you rampaged around by foot or vehicle is now something you feel the journey of by the literal scale of your party's bodies. Every inch of this world, its biomes and its cities, are places you learn to navigate and remember the layouts of. Every story beat that makes you travel to new locations feels earned, and there's so many moments throughout the story that taking a moment to look back on how far you've come feels unbelievably grand. What I cared more about than the world of FF7 was the characters and Rebirth still more than delivers on that front. As controversial as this trilogy has already become in regards to changes and additions it makes (which, we'll get there), the way that the team at Square have re-interpreted this cast and brought them to life works so incredibly well that it's hard not to think that the next time I go back to replay that original PS1 game, I'm going to be hearing the voices of this version's cast, thinking about how they interacted with the world and play off of each other. Essentially everyone has a moment to really grow and expand their personalities and backgrounds with more detail and time than the original ever could have, and in turn it makes this party not just a group of pretty designs and surface level personalities, but a group of well defined believable people. Countless additional moments big and small across the entire game continue to flesh out the world and characters and save for a handful of segments, I thought they were all smartly integrated in adding onto the original story.
Rebirth also takes a bit of time to refine some of Remake's gameplay edges. The menus are initially incredibly overwhelming after not having touched Remake in a few years, but after enough time I appreciate that there's not only more personality in showing the actual character models compared to static portraits over a blue background, but also how much more informative a lot of those initially overwhelming menus actually are compared to Remake. The annoying upgrade system from Remake was slightly revamped with an entire new menu that's more reminescent of the sphere grids from other Final Fantasy games, with my only real complaint being that I wish I could zoom out the view more. Weapon upgrades were simplified to essentially being swappable like materia is including an auto-upgrade option that takes out some of the tinkering if you don't really want to bother with the fine minutiae, especially with how many weapons you end up getting over the course of the game. Combat feels faster paced overall thanks to Synergy Skills, a smart inclusion that at least with the parties I tended to use, resolved a lot of the annoyances Remake had with particular enemy types. While we still don't have a dedicated jump button (the Jump materia doesn't count; thing has a different purpose anyways), a lot of Synergy Skills with most party members tend to either give you a ranged move or send you into the air with proper player agency. There's also a massive quality of life addition in giving every party member unlockable abilities through that sphere grid menu that gives you free elemental abilities without any materia and MP needed, at the expense of less damage. It resolves the issue of being stuck with party members that aren't as well equipped who just need to fulfill the pressure conditions of different enemies across the board and keeps things moving along. There was the occasional frustrating moment or enemy that felt annoying to deal with, but nothing that felt like it was a core flaw with the game design itself. It's more of Remake but more fleshed out; if you liked that game's combat, you will like Rebirth's.
But now I have to talk about the open world, and that's where the overwhelming majority of my issues with Rebirth come into play. Open world games have always been a tough sell for me because I am self-admittedly impatient with very little attention span. Rebirth took me almost 2 months to finish with 76 hours of total playtime. I have definitely played longer games like Persona 5 in less time than that, and to put a long story short I think it's just because Rebirth doesn't respect your time whatsoever. I would go from loving every linear main story segment, stuff that properly moved things along into new territory and things I hadn't seen before, to dreading the moment I would have to step back into open world territory at the end of those segments. There was a period of time during the first third of the game or so that I really had to sit there and debate if I wanted to boot up the PS5 to keep playing because I was so sick of doing Chadley's Chores(tm), running around for Ubisoft towers so I could be given waypoints on the map to fight a group of monsters for Chadley to gain intel on, hold up on the D-Pad for my chocobo to slowly sniff dig sites that Chadley helped locate for you, play Simon Says for lowering the difficulty of summon fights so Chadley can praise you, play more of the godforsaken card game for the hundredth time, finish the tens if not hundreds of VR fights by talking to Chadley who I'm about ready to strangle by that point, and then collecting protorelics on a game-wide hunt for them which Chadley will also talk you to death over finding.
Besides how much I hope Chadley gets fucking popped like a balloon at the start of the third remake game so I never have to see or hear him again, I just... thoroughly do not understand what makes the actual moment to moment gameplay of this open world so awe-inspiring to people. Again, open world games are a tough sell to me; I kind of infamously don't care very much for the open worlds of Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom because I think they get tedious and repetitive, and still kind of filled with a lot of empty nothing. Simultaneously for those games though, I can at least respect them, more in BOTW's case because some of that emptiness was the point in both world building, tone and atmosphere, and pacing. It's also how much player agency and control those two games in particular give you, with rarely a moment that the player doesn't have full control over where they're going, what they're finding, and how they're doing it. Ubisoft towers and checklists aren't anything new, it's that Rebirth makes those tasks so exceedingly mundane and stretched out, pushed to such a degree that it's frankly incredible how dedicated it is to wasting your time. So many animations that are pushed to their limit making you wait around for things to happen that just continually add up, watching Chadley and his own AI creation fucking bicker at each other as your reward for finishing those checklist fights, so many back and forths for things that just don't reward you meaningfully, either in the end result or even the journey that got you there.
I feel awful for anyone who is a completionist because you genuinely, truly have to be a masochist to get everything for that platinum. You aren't just doing everything, you have to attain mastery of everything including the countless number of gimmicks and minigames that Rebirth offers. It might be worse however for people like me, who wanted to at least get a majority of the side content done to see what most of the game had to offer. You aren't just not rewarded for not fully finishing stuff like the protorelic quest, you're given a middle finger by the very last hours of the game when you discover the last side quest is actually one that demands that you perfect every Gold Saucer minigame. Or when you discover that the protorelic quest doesn't just end after completing all regions, you actually get a Brand New Fuck You Zone whose level requirement is the highest level in the game, over twenty levels beyond what you would be at by the endgame. Oh you don't want to do that? Fuck you, you get nothing for all that time you spent doing this game-wide questline. Completing Queen's Blood wasn't much better even if it's actually doable on your first playthrough, you get an alright cutscene or two, a shiny title for yourself and an extra card as your reward which you won't be using because you already finished everything by that point.
There's a cynical part of me that has to wonder if all of this bloat was because this is a triple-A game release in this current generation costing $70 dollars. Was it a value proposition? "Look at this game with over a hundred hours worth of content?" Is this what people actually want? I had said already with Remake that I think it's a great 45 hour game that could have been excellent if it was like 5-10 hours shorter, with tighter pacing and less bloat. I have no idea what spurred on Square Enix to double down on it and create what I think is just a good game that could have been great if it was 30-40 hours shorter. I shouldn't have to shoulder the responsibility that I'm complaining about "optional content" because I'm not a tool. Rebirth is a game that begs and pleads with you to engage with it, and doing so felt like being pricked by needles slowly and agonizingly, because there was the very real chance that it was going to be worth it by the end. The side quests mostly were. The pure junk food with Chadley and the open world were not. I wish I could have those tens of hours back so I could've focused on the main story and helped tighten the pacing of it. I know this is game I am not going to replay for years, and if I ever do, I am actively skipping that content with the post-game knowledge to do so.
The only other thing I have to end my piece on is a light look ahead to the future regarding Rebirth's ending, and without spoiling it. I'll just say that Remake's ending I was sold on, and loved that it very intentionally was going in a new direction akin to something like the Evangelion Rebuilds, even if I felt bad for new players who hadn't played the original that they were going to be thrown for a loop. I am far less sold on Rebirth's ending, and my worries for that final third entry have skyrocketed now because of how messy it was. There's too many unknowns that have raised the stakes for Square to nail the landing, and there's a very real possibility that they're going to miss which would truly be a shame for the insane amount of work and effort on display thus far to be retroactively dismissed if they can't nail the finale. I pray they can to make all of this worth something more.
Rebirth also takes a bit of time to refine some of Remake's gameplay edges. The menus are initially incredibly overwhelming after not having touched Remake in a few years, but after enough time I appreciate that there's not only more personality in showing the actual character models compared to static portraits over a blue background, but also how much more informative a lot of those initially overwhelming menus actually are compared to Remake. The annoying upgrade system from Remake was slightly revamped with an entire new menu that's more reminescent of the sphere grids from other Final Fantasy games, with my only real complaint being that I wish I could zoom out the view more. Weapon upgrades were simplified to essentially being swappable like materia is including an auto-upgrade option that takes out some of the tinkering if you don't really want to bother with the fine minutiae, especially with how many weapons you end up getting over the course of the game. Combat feels faster paced overall thanks to Synergy Skills, a smart inclusion that at least with the parties I tended to use, resolved a lot of the annoyances Remake had with particular enemy types. While we still don't have a dedicated jump button (the Jump materia doesn't count; thing has a different purpose anyways), a lot of Synergy Skills with most party members tend to either give you a ranged move or send you into the air with proper player agency. There's also a massive quality of life addition in giving every party member unlockable abilities through that sphere grid menu that gives you free elemental abilities without any materia and MP needed, at the expense of less damage. It resolves the issue of being stuck with party members that aren't as well equipped who just need to fulfill the pressure conditions of different enemies across the board and keeps things moving along. There was the occasional frustrating moment or enemy that felt annoying to deal with, but nothing that felt like it was a core flaw with the game design itself. It's more of Remake but more fleshed out; if you liked that game's combat, you will like Rebirth's.
But now I have to talk about the open world, and that's where the overwhelming majority of my issues with Rebirth come into play. Open world games have always been a tough sell for me because I am self-admittedly impatient with very little attention span. Rebirth took me almost 2 months to finish with 76 hours of total playtime. I have definitely played longer games like Persona 5 in less time than that, and to put a long story short I think it's just because Rebirth doesn't respect your time whatsoever. I would go from loving every linear main story segment, stuff that properly moved things along into new territory and things I hadn't seen before, to dreading the moment I would have to step back into open world territory at the end of those segments. There was a period of time during the first third of the game or so that I really had to sit there and debate if I wanted to boot up the PS5 to keep playing because I was so sick of doing Chadley's Chores(tm), running around for Ubisoft towers so I could be given waypoints on the map to fight a group of monsters for Chadley to gain intel on, hold up on the D-Pad for my chocobo to slowly sniff dig sites that Chadley helped locate for you, play Simon Says for lowering the difficulty of summon fights so Chadley can praise you, play more of the godforsaken card game for the hundredth time, finish the tens if not hundreds of VR fights by talking to Chadley who I'm about ready to strangle by that point, and then collecting protorelics on a game-wide hunt for them which Chadley will also talk you to death over finding.
Besides how much I hope Chadley gets fucking popped like a balloon at the start of the third remake game so I never have to see or hear him again, I just... thoroughly do not understand what makes the actual moment to moment gameplay of this open world so awe-inspiring to people. Again, open world games are a tough sell to me; I kind of infamously don't care very much for the open worlds of Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom because I think they get tedious and repetitive, and still kind of filled with a lot of empty nothing. Simultaneously for those games though, I can at least respect them, more in BOTW's case because some of that emptiness was the point in both world building, tone and atmosphere, and pacing. It's also how much player agency and control those two games in particular give you, with rarely a moment that the player doesn't have full control over where they're going, what they're finding, and how they're doing it. Ubisoft towers and checklists aren't anything new, it's that Rebirth makes those tasks so exceedingly mundane and stretched out, pushed to such a degree that it's frankly incredible how dedicated it is to wasting your time. So many animations that are pushed to their limit making you wait around for things to happen that just continually add up, watching Chadley and his own AI creation fucking bicker at each other as your reward for finishing those checklist fights, so many back and forths for things that just don't reward you meaningfully, either in the end result or even the journey that got you there.
I feel awful for anyone who is a completionist because you genuinely, truly have to be a masochist to get everything for that platinum. You aren't just doing everything, you have to attain mastery of everything including the countless number of gimmicks and minigames that Rebirth offers. It might be worse however for people like me, who wanted to at least get a majority of the side content done to see what most of the game had to offer. You aren't just not rewarded for not fully finishing stuff like the protorelic quest, you're given a middle finger by the very last hours of the game when you discover the last side quest is actually one that demands that you perfect every Gold Saucer minigame. Or when you discover that the protorelic quest doesn't just end after completing all regions, you actually get a Brand New Fuck You Zone whose level requirement is the highest level in the game, over twenty levels beyond what you would be at by the endgame. Oh you don't want to do that? Fuck you, you get nothing for all that time you spent doing this game-wide questline. Completing Queen's Blood wasn't much better even if it's actually doable on your first playthrough, you get an alright cutscene or two, a shiny title for yourself and an extra card as your reward which you won't be using because you already finished everything by that point.
There's a cynical part of me that has to wonder if all of this bloat was because this is a triple-A game release in this current generation costing $70 dollars. Was it a value proposition? "Look at this game with over a hundred hours worth of content?" Is this what people actually want? I had said already with Remake that I think it's a great 45 hour game that could have been excellent if it was like 5-10 hours shorter, with tighter pacing and less bloat. I have no idea what spurred on Square Enix to double down on it and create what I think is just a good game that could have been great if it was 30-40 hours shorter. I shouldn't have to shoulder the responsibility that I'm complaining about "optional content" because I'm not a tool. Rebirth is a game that begs and pleads with you to engage with it, and doing so felt like being pricked by needles slowly and agonizingly, because there was the very real chance that it was going to be worth it by the end. The side quests mostly were. The pure junk food with Chadley and the open world were not. I wish I could have those tens of hours back so I could've focused on the main story and helped tighten the pacing of it. I know this is game I am not going to replay for years, and if I ever do, I am actively skipping that content with the post-game knowledge to do so.
The only other thing I have to end my piece on is a light look ahead to the future regarding Rebirth's ending, and without spoiling it. I'll just say that Remake's ending I was sold on, and loved that it very intentionally was going in a new direction akin to something like the Evangelion Rebuilds, even if I felt bad for new players who hadn't played the original that they were going to be thrown for a loop. I am far less sold on Rebirth's ending, and my worries for that final third entry have skyrocketed now because of how messy it was. There's too many unknowns that have raised the stakes for Square to nail the landing, and there's a very real possibility that they're going to miss which would truly be a shame for the insane amount of work and effort on display thus far to be retroactively dismissed if they can't nail the finale. I pray they can to make all of this worth something more.
Final Fantasy VII
1997
This review contains spoilers
Ah, Final Fantasy VII. My fondness for this amazing title is almost unexplainable. I’m not going to write some sort of long and in depth review of this game, as almost everything that there is to be said about it… already has. Rather, this is just a short couple paragraphs explaining why this game is important to me (and video games as a whole).
The cast of charming characters, the engaging story, the dystopian aesthetics, the FANTASTIC score by Nobou Uematsu, it all just works. You’re really interested in Cloud’s arc of discovering his true self, and wanting to settle the score with Sephiroth. His dynamic with both Tifa and Aerith is cute and endearing, but also dramatic. Throughout the story, you can tell that they have a bit of a rivalry (for Cloud’s affection depending on how you interpret it), but become great friends. When Aerith dies, Tifa’s reaction before Cloud carries her to the water is genuinely heartbreaking. Barret, while his dialogue may feel very stereotypical, is really someone who’s sympathetic and wants the best for his child. When Dyne passes away, you really want to help him succeed in his motivation to stop Shinra. Cid is a grumpy old man who wants to succeed in his dream to visit space, and in the end he does. Red XIII’s story of understanding why his father died and regretting his hatred towards him is somber. There might’ve been some… catlike character in the game? I don’t remember. Both Yuffie and Vincent have their optional stories for you to resolve, adding more story and depth to the game, while still not being mandatory if you’re not interested.
I could go more into the gameplay and especially the music, but I wanted the latter half of this review to focus on moments I personally loved/ how the game impacted me. But in case you’re wondering what I think of the soundtrack: I think it’s some of Uematsu’s finest, plain and simple. Depending on the day of the week it’s either my favorite or second favorite, but it’s nothing short of incredible regardless.
”Cloud… did you see it all?”
My favorite segment of the entire game is when Tifa enters Cloud’s subconscious after they fall into the lifestream. This is finally when Cloud’s arc meets its climax, and leads up to one of my favorite moments in a video game period. After Cloud completely snaps during the beginning of Disc 2, Tifa finally comes through to help him remember his true self, and accept it.
“...You came… you kept your promise”
But what leaves the most impact, is definitely the end of Cloud’s recovery of memories. When he pulls the sword after being stabbed, as Uematsu’s INCREDIBLE score begins to hit its climax… it’s just such an amazing and impactful moment. He throws Sephiroth into the mako reactor, and the score quiets down, as Cloud has essentially died at this point, only being able to live after being experimented on.
This moment has probably been discussed online countless times throughout the years, but I can't not gush about it. I maybe even cried about it, gives me chills nearly every time.
FFVII isn’t what got me into just Final Fantasy, or just RPGs. It got me into the wider lens of video games as a whole. This game is what made me interested in reaching out to other developers, like Capcom. I would’ve missed out on so many amazing titles had this game not enlightened me. When I first played FFVII, I didn’t think too much of it. I liked it, and thought it was cool, but that was about it. Looking back in retrospect, and revisiting the game a handful of times made me realize how important this game is to me. It’s definitely one of my favorite video games of all time, maybe even my absolute favorite. Talking about this game with friends online is also a treat. One of my friends, Josh_The_Fourth for example, got into this game after I bugged him about it several times, and he even really liked it in the end. You’re a real one, Josh.
If this review was a little incoherent, I apologize, I really just wanted to look back on why I love this game. If you haven’t played FFVII, I highly encourage you to give it a shot. If it’s not the game for you, that’s understandable, of course. Thank you, to everyone at Squaresoft who made this fantastic game possible.
Happy 25 Years, Final Fantasy VII.
The cast of charming characters, the engaging story, the dystopian aesthetics, the FANTASTIC score by Nobou Uematsu, it all just works. You’re really interested in Cloud’s arc of discovering his true self, and wanting to settle the score with Sephiroth. His dynamic with both Tifa and Aerith is cute and endearing, but also dramatic. Throughout the story, you can tell that they have a bit of a rivalry (for Cloud’s affection depending on how you interpret it), but become great friends. When Aerith dies, Tifa’s reaction before Cloud carries her to the water is genuinely heartbreaking. Barret, while his dialogue may feel very stereotypical, is really someone who’s sympathetic and wants the best for his child. When Dyne passes away, you really want to help him succeed in his motivation to stop Shinra. Cid is a grumpy old man who wants to succeed in his dream to visit space, and in the end he does. Red XIII’s story of understanding why his father died and regretting his hatred towards him is somber. There might’ve been some… catlike character in the game? I don’t remember. Both Yuffie and Vincent have their optional stories for you to resolve, adding more story and depth to the game, while still not being mandatory if you’re not interested.
I could go more into the gameplay and especially the music, but I wanted the latter half of this review to focus on moments I personally loved/ how the game impacted me. But in case you’re wondering what I think of the soundtrack: I think it’s some of Uematsu’s finest, plain and simple. Depending on the day of the week it’s either my favorite or second favorite, but it’s nothing short of incredible regardless.
”Cloud… did you see it all?”
My favorite segment of the entire game is when Tifa enters Cloud’s subconscious after they fall into the lifestream. This is finally when Cloud’s arc meets its climax, and leads up to one of my favorite moments in a video game period. After Cloud completely snaps during the beginning of Disc 2, Tifa finally comes through to help him remember his true self, and accept it.
“...You came… you kept your promise”
But what leaves the most impact, is definitely the end of Cloud’s recovery of memories. When he pulls the sword after being stabbed, as Uematsu’s INCREDIBLE score begins to hit its climax… it’s just such an amazing and impactful moment. He throws Sephiroth into the mako reactor, and the score quiets down, as Cloud has essentially died at this point, only being able to live after being experimented on.
This moment has probably been discussed online countless times throughout the years, but I can't not gush about it. I maybe even cried about it, gives me chills nearly every time.
FFVII isn’t what got me into just Final Fantasy, or just RPGs. It got me into the wider lens of video games as a whole. This game is what made me interested in reaching out to other developers, like Capcom. I would’ve missed out on so many amazing titles had this game not enlightened me. When I first played FFVII, I didn’t think too much of it. I liked it, and thought it was cool, but that was about it. Looking back in retrospect, and revisiting the game a handful of times made me realize how important this game is to me. It’s definitely one of my favorite video games of all time, maybe even my absolute favorite. Talking about this game with friends online is also a treat. One of my friends, Josh_The_Fourth for example, got into this game after I bugged him about it several times, and he even really liked it in the end. You’re a real one, Josh.
If this review was a little incoherent, I apologize, I really just wanted to look back on why I love this game. If you haven’t played FFVII, I highly encourage you to give it a shot. If it’s not the game for you, that’s understandable, of course. Thank you, to everyone at Squaresoft who made this fantastic game possible.
Happy 25 Years, Final Fantasy VII.
The Legend of Zelda
1986
Remarkably, the good majority of Zelda holds up in the current day. It's interesting to hear people call this a "guide game" in a negative lens because... that's always how it was marketed and sold to us. The manual that comes with the game not only expands quite a deal on the story and context of this first entry, but includes gorgeous artwork and maps - complete with walkthroughs for the first few dungeons - to get a new player started. This was indeed always meant to be an adventure, one the player would get their nose lost in manuals, handwritten notes and drawings, and of course not the least of which murmurings and tips passed between friends in the schoolyard and the fabled Nintendo hotline.
That said, the original Zelda experience isn't without flaw, for all of its adventure purist expression. I think Miyamoto and the team learned pretty quickly that an indicator for which bushes to burn, which boulders and walls to bomb, and stronger guidance for the sake of general gameplay flow were all in order by the time Link to the Past would roll around. The combat so desperately wants Link to have an arced swing of his sword, evidenced by how much combat relies on inter-tile maneuvering, but it's not quite there yet. Still a massive step in the right direction from the competitions' push-combat approach... much as I do like early Ys. What's here is still very solid, and a great deal of fun. I just replayed this with my best friend in an impromptu single session and it didn't drag at all. For as minimal and bare-bones as Zelda feels now, that adds to the unique charm and status it takes within its series and adventure games as a whole.
That said, the original Zelda experience isn't without flaw, for all of its adventure purist expression. I think Miyamoto and the team learned pretty quickly that an indicator for which bushes to burn, which boulders and walls to bomb, and stronger guidance for the sake of general gameplay flow were all in order by the time Link to the Past would roll around. The combat so desperately wants Link to have an arced swing of his sword, evidenced by how much combat relies on inter-tile maneuvering, but it's not quite there yet. Still a massive step in the right direction from the competitions' push-combat approach... much as I do like early Ys. What's here is still very solid, and a great deal of fun. I just replayed this with my best friend in an impromptu single session and it didn't drag at all. For as minimal and bare-bones as Zelda feels now, that adds to the unique charm and status it takes within its series and adventure games as a whole.
Final Fantasy VII
1997
within a span of two months, from september to november of 2019, i lost an old friend and former lover to bone cancer at 23 years old, and my father revealed to me that he’d been diagnosed with stage 2 lung cancer. this would indicate a nearly three year journey to where i am now - a sequence of events which tested the limits of my perseverance, willpower, camaraderie, self-love, and actualization of community. my life underwent severe changes throughout this period; essentially revising my entire outlook on my relationships to patching up and mending my relationship with my dad which had resulted in some pretty catastrophic gaps gashed out pretty equally on both sides. some outside events completely reformed how i lived, the safety and love i had to provide myself for my own wellbeing, and fostering a lot of growth and evolution out of a patch where what i’d known and what i held onto were slipping through my fingers.
during this time, my father set an example of how he would choose to live. he combatted cancer and heartbreak with rudiment, structure, dedication and iron will. i watched him break on more than a few occasions. but it was through his search for that light where he found his own branch of buddhism, practice of meditation, and a new outlook on his life. he began to teach me the lessons he’d taken away - both of us being that type of person with loud, constantly-spewing minds. he instilled and internalized the idea that meditation and serenity are not about clearing the mind of thought, but finding a means to acknowledge the thought and move on from it. it was only along the lines of that practice that we both began to unbox our trauma - both conjoined and individual. it was only then when we could cultivate growth, hope, and those first rays of light.
i had no access to therapy or professional help at the time. i was between jobs when i wasn't crammed into ones that abused and berated me and my time. my greatest resources for self-love, as they are now, were my loved ones and my then-cracked-yet-unbroken devotion to art. traumatic attachments kept me apart from those things i loved most, but in the process of recovering from a sequence in time in which i felt like i’d lost myself, figured it took recessing back to those works which had so clearly defined attics of my life to that point to regain shards of who i’d been, and define who i would choose to be moving forward. over the next year, i would play final fantasy vii six times to completion, twice with friends, four times on my own. the hanging threads of grief, trauma, self-actualization v. dissociation, lack of direction - these things culminated in a story which more and more i felt whispered answers directly to me, for my consumption alone. it’s in those moments where a bond is made between art and audience where the attachment becomes not just inseparable, but near essential.
final fantasy vii doesn’t hand you answers for the questions you come to it with. there isn’t a resolution to the trauma, there isn’t a solution to the pain or the grief. it is an embrace, and a hold of the hand, and a gentle call; “here is how you live with yourself. here is how you learn to be alive again.” the sociopolitical conflicts, the internal struggles, the budding seeds of affection and fraternity don’t reach a natural apex - they hum in anticipation of a deciding factor which never comes. perpetually trapped within the question, but offering you the means to provide your own answer in life. the final shot of the game isn’t a conclusion meant to be expanded upon. it’s simply a closing of the cover, the final page turned before the index of note paper before being passed to you with the command - “apply yourself. turn this into something that matters.” so i chose to.
and i found myself in midgar again, with new friends and a new outlook.
you come back to the slums of wall market and sector 7 with a new worldview and appreciation each time. there’s a different purpose, when your relationship with this game is as intimate as mine, for coming back here. i know the smog, the street life, the feeling of inescapable, walled-in urban destitution well. you grow up in any city poor enough and you get to know midgar intimately. it’s a familiar setting with a familiar social agency. the seventh heaven crew, they’re all faces i’ve known, fires in bellies i once shared, and now understand in a different light. they’re old friends i knew in my activism years as a teenager, they’re people i looked up to and lost through the years. i’ve lost a lot of people and a lot of faith over time. it might seem like a quick moment to many but the sector 7 tower fight reminds me of people and things that exist only in memories now.
the moment the world opens up and the main theme plays, while unscripted, is one of the most powerful in the game to me. i retain that this title track might be my favorite piece of video game music and such a perfect encapsulation of the game’s philosophy and emotional core. stinging synth strings meet acoustic woodwind and orchestral drones. playful countermelodies give way to massive, bombastic chords in a rocking interplay that rarely fails to inspire, intrigue and invoke. uematsu-sensei, unquestionably at the apex of his mastery here, provides his most timeless score. i think about, am inspired by, and draw from his work here intensely. the artistry pours out from every nook of final fantasy vii - the models, the cutscenes, the background renders, the gameplay systems, the story, the use of diegetic sound, the pacing, the designs - everything came together in a way that somehow evokes equal feelings of nostalgia, futurism, dread, fear, warmth, love, hope, and utter timelessness. streaming and voice-acting this entire game with my close friends was one of the best experiences of my year. hitting each turn with a decently blind audience provided both knowing and loving perspective and the unmitigated rush of first experience - in tandem, a passing of the torch, an unspeakable gift of an unbroken chain shared between loved ones. if final fantasy vii saved my life once before, this was the run which restored its meaning and direction.
i’ve been cloud, i’ve been tifa, i’ve been barret, i’ve been nanaki. i’ve been zack, i’ve been aerith. there are lives lived in the confines of final fantasy vii which i hold as pieces of my own, countless repetitions of those stories with those resolutions my own to meet, different each time. there was something magic about the ability to, a year after that painful strike of all of that anguish, that death, that loss, that fear, sit on the end screen as the series’ endless “prelude” played amongst 32-bit starfields and openly sob for a half hour surrounded by the voices and words of my loved ones. that was the day i learned to live again. it’s more than a game when you know it this intimately. it’s more than an experience when you share these scars. it’s more than art when you hold onto so dearly. there isn’t a classifier for what final fantasy vii means to me other than, “a lot”. sometimes, less is more. i don’t have a conclusion beyond that for you. the experience recalls everyone and everything i've ever loved and lost, and all that i've come to gain and hold dear. goodbye to some, hello to all the rest. true, reading this, it may have been a waste of your time, but i’m glad i was able to share this with someone. i hope this reaches at least one of you on a level you needed today, or maybe it invokes something in you about something you love so dearly. i’m here to tell you - this is how i learned to live again. if you need someone to tell you, today, that you can too, here it is. you aren’t alone. go find those answers for yourself.
please don't step on the flowers on your way.
during this time, my father set an example of how he would choose to live. he combatted cancer and heartbreak with rudiment, structure, dedication and iron will. i watched him break on more than a few occasions. but it was through his search for that light where he found his own branch of buddhism, practice of meditation, and a new outlook on his life. he began to teach me the lessons he’d taken away - both of us being that type of person with loud, constantly-spewing minds. he instilled and internalized the idea that meditation and serenity are not about clearing the mind of thought, but finding a means to acknowledge the thought and move on from it. it was only along the lines of that practice that we both began to unbox our trauma - both conjoined and individual. it was only then when we could cultivate growth, hope, and those first rays of light.
i had no access to therapy or professional help at the time. i was between jobs when i wasn't crammed into ones that abused and berated me and my time. my greatest resources for self-love, as they are now, were my loved ones and my then-cracked-yet-unbroken devotion to art. traumatic attachments kept me apart from those things i loved most, but in the process of recovering from a sequence in time in which i felt like i’d lost myself, figured it took recessing back to those works which had so clearly defined attics of my life to that point to regain shards of who i’d been, and define who i would choose to be moving forward. over the next year, i would play final fantasy vii six times to completion, twice with friends, four times on my own. the hanging threads of grief, trauma, self-actualization v. dissociation, lack of direction - these things culminated in a story which more and more i felt whispered answers directly to me, for my consumption alone. it’s in those moments where a bond is made between art and audience where the attachment becomes not just inseparable, but near essential.
final fantasy vii doesn’t hand you answers for the questions you come to it with. there isn’t a resolution to the trauma, there isn’t a solution to the pain or the grief. it is an embrace, and a hold of the hand, and a gentle call; “here is how you live with yourself. here is how you learn to be alive again.” the sociopolitical conflicts, the internal struggles, the budding seeds of affection and fraternity don’t reach a natural apex - they hum in anticipation of a deciding factor which never comes. perpetually trapped within the question, but offering you the means to provide your own answer in life. the final shot of the game isn’t a conclusion meant to be expanded upon. it’s simply a closing of the cover, the final page turned before the index of note paper before being passed to you with the command - “apply yourself. turn this into something that matters.” so i chose to.
and i found myself in midgar again, with new friends and a new outlook.
you come back to the slums of wall market and sector 7 with a new worldview and appreciation each time. there’s a different purpose, when your relationship with this game is as intimate as mine, for coming back here. i know the smog, the street life, the feeling of inescapable, walled-in urban destitution well. you grow up in any city poor enough and you get to know midgar intimately. it’s a familiar setting with a familiar social agency. the seventh heaven crew, they’re all faces i’ve known, fires in bellies i once shared, and now understand in a different light. they’re old friends i knew in my activism years as a teenager, they’re people i looked up to and lost through the years. i’ve lost a lot of people and a lot of faith over time. it might seem like a quick moment to many but the sector 7 tower fight reminds me of people and things that exist only in memories now.
the moment the world opens up and the main theme plays, while unscripted, is one of the most powerful in the game to me. i retain that this title track might be my favorite piece of video game music and such a perfect encapsulation of the game’s philosophy and emotional core. stinging synth strings meet acoustic woodwind and orchestral drones. playful countermelodies give way to massive, bombastic chords in a rocking interplay that rarely fails to inspire, intrigue and invoke. uematsu-sensei, unquestionably at the apex of his mastery here, provides his most timeless score. i think about, am inspired by, and draw from his work here intensely. the artistry pours out from every nook of final fantasy vii - the models, the cutscenes, the background renders, the gameplay systems, the story, the use of diegetic sound, the pacing, the designs - everything came together in a way that somehow evokes equal feelings of nostalgia, futurism, dread, fear, warmth, love, hope, and utter timelessness. streaming and voice-acting this entire game with my close friends was one of the best experiences of my year. hitting each turn with a decently blind audience provided both knowing and loving perspective and the unmitigated rush of first experience - in tandem, a passing of the torch, an unspeakable gift of an unbroken chain shared between loved ones. if final fantasy vii saved my life once before, this was the run which restored its meaning and direction.
i’ve been cloud, i’ve been tifa, i’ve been barret, i’ve been nanaki. i’ve been zack, i’ve been aerith. there are lives lived in the confines of final fantasy vii which i hold as pieces of my own, countless repetitions of those stories with those resolutions my own to meet, different each time. there was something magic about the ability to, a year after that painful strike of all of that anguish, that death, that loss, that fear, sit on the end screen as the series’ endless “prelude” played amongst 32-bit starfields and openly sob for a half hour surrounded by the voices and words of my loved ones. that was the day i learned to live again. it’s more than a game when you know it this intimately. it’s more than an experience when you share these scars. it’s more than art when you hold onto so dearly. there isn’t a classifier for what final fantasy vii means to me other than, “a lot”. sometimes, less is more. i don’t have a conclusion beyond that for you. the experience recalls everyone and everything i've ever loved and lost, and all that i've come to gain and hold dear. goodbye to some, hello to all the rest. true, reading this, it may have been a waste of your time, but i’m glad i was able to share this with someone. i hope this reaches at least one of you on a level you needed today, or maybe it invokes something in you about something you love so dearly. i’m here to tell you - this is how i learned to live again. if you need someone to tell you, today, that you can too, here it is. you aren’t alone. go find those answers for yourself.
please don't step on the flowers on your way.
NieR RepliCant
2010
This review contains spoilers
NieR Replicant takes the structure of video-games and utterly lampoons it, showing just how much we're willing to take for granted when presented to us in this structure. The protagonist is such a video-game character, willing to do any odd job no matter how menial or violent. The last thing he can do for his sick sister is actually be around more often, because he has a ridiculous quest to go on for a slight chance at curing her, and in video-games we don't stay at home to care for sick relatives, we go on quests.
I have not played Drakengard, but I understand its purpose was to highlight the mass-murderous actions of the typical video-game protagonist, that one would either have to be insane to mindlessly commit such acts or be made insane in the process. Yoko Taro evolved his thinking after 9/11 and subsequently the Iraq War, stating "You just have to think you're right. So that's why I made NieR a game revolving around this concept of "being able to kill others if you think you're right," or "everyone believes that they're in the right"." NieR Replicant is, on the surface, a game about found family, making hope in a dying world, and the virtue of kindness. This is how it feels on an emotional level, and so to an extent it IS about all these things, but when you begin to understand the protagonist's actions in the context of the broader narrative it becomes apparent just how destructive they are.
The combat of Drakengard seems appropriately mindless for the perspective on violence Taro was offering in that game, but with NieR Replicant he had a much tougher job - it had to be enjoyable, but for this enjoyment to transition into mindlessness as the true nature of the protagonist's actions comes into full view. It succeeds, with combat that's good enough but not so complex that it couldn't devolve into mindlessness, genre switching to bring variety, well-executed set-pieces, and JRPG items and weapon upgrade materials which might not be totally useless. When you run through the last few sections over and over for new endings, not only do you do so knowing the consequences of the protagonist's actions, but are also given additional context provided in these playthroughs. It's at this stage that the levelling system has you taking out bosses in a few hits, the genre-switching sections become rote mechanical exercises, the items and upgrades are revealed to be extraneous video-gamey nonsense, and the combat, the whole game even, becomes a mindless exercise in violence. It's a tedious process, but if it weren't would that not defeat the purpose?
Such a difficult game to approach discussing. The experience of it is totally different depending on which level you approach it from. I feel dishonest discussing the actions of the party so negatively, as I truly loved these characters and empathised with them deeply. But I suppose that's the point. They're working with an incomplete picture, with both the player and party making assumptions based on the expectation of what video-games are. Emile and Kainé suffer as the result of Othering, while giving little critical thought to how they may be engaged in the same process; they're just following the player, and the player knows how video-games work.
I have not played Drakengard, but I understand its purpose was to highlight the mass-murderous actions of the typical video-game protagonist, that one would either have to be insane to mindlessly commit such acts or be made insane in the process. Yoko Taro evolved his thinking after 9/11 and subsequently the Iraq War, stating "You just have to think you're right. So that's why I made NieR a game revolving around this concept of "being able to kill others if you think you're right," or "everyone believes that they're in the right"." NieR Replicant is, on the surface, a game about found family, making hope in a dying world, and the virtue of kindness. This is how it feels on an emotional level, and so to an extent it IS about all these things, but when you begin to understand the protagonist's actions in the context of the broader narrative it becomes apparent just how destructive they are.
The combat of Drakengard seems appropriately mindless for the perspective on violence Taro was offering in that game, but with NieR Replicant he had a much tougher job - it had to be enjoyable, but for this enjoyment to transition into mindlessness as the true nature of the protagonist's actions comes into full view. It succeeds, with combat that's good enough but not so complex that it couldn't devolve into mindlessness, genre switching to bring variety, well-executed set-pieces, and JRPG items and weapon upgrade materials which might not be totally useless. When you run through the last few sections over and over for new endings, not only do you do so knowing the consequences of the protagonist's actions, but are also given additional context provided in these playthroughs. It's at this stage that the levelling system has you taking out bosses in a few hits, the genre-switching sections become rote mechanical exercises, the items and upgrades are revealed to be extraneous video-gamey nonsense, and the combat, the whole game even, becomes a mindless exercise in violence. It's a tedious process, but if it weren't would that not defeat the purpose?
Such a difficult game to approach discussing. The experience of it is totally different depending on which level you approach it from. I feel dishonest discussing the actions of the party so negatively, as I truly loved these characters and empathised with them deeply. But I suppose that's the point. They're working with an incomplete picture, with both the player and party making assumptions based on the expectation of what video-games are. Emile and Kainé suffer as the result of Othering, while giving little critical thought to how they may be engaged in the same process; they're just following the player, and the player knows how video-games work.
Dolphin Blue
2003
Ever play Metal slug and think to yourself "That was great and all but it really needs 100% more dolphin". Well boy do I have the game for you!
Evidently some former Metal Slug developers had the same thought when making this run and gun for Sammy Corporation in the early 2000s. Initially only released in arcades on Sammy's Atmoiswave arcade boards but later ported to Dreamcast by fans a few years ago to allow more people to experience it. Though adding in it's own unique ideas Dolphin Blue is such a close representation of Metal Slug you would think it was actually a spin off by SNK themselves. The military uniforms, guns and even the sound effects in places sound like they are just samples taken from it's influential forebear.
You get two characters to potentially play as, Erio an Arms Dealer and Anne a soldier. Regardless of who you play as in this adventure you will shoot through hordes of soldiers as they kidnap the Kingdom's Princess as the main premise. The most striking thing about Dolphin Blue are the visuals. It uses a mixture of chunky 3D backgrounds with 2D sprite characters and it's a gorgeous mix. Whilst the sprite work isn't the best I have seen of that era the colours and contrast with it's backgrounds make the game a real looker to play through. There is a lot going on at any one time with a lot of action and enemies on screen. A lot of the humour of the Metal Slug games is present such as scuba diver enemies suits inflating up when damaged and soldiers dangling precariously off of runaway trains in a very comic fashion. The levels themselves are pretty memorable with flooded mines, battleships, airships in a 1940's style diesel punk aesthetic.
There are only 5 levels but there only needs to be because this game is bloody hard. There are 3 types of gameplay in it's hour or so runtime though all three are run and gun type of foot, swimming or dolphin riding. Each have the same principle of shooting enemies, stabbing them if they get close whilst picking up some weapon power ups like Vulcans, missiles or firecracker grenades. These weapons have limited ammo and though frequent aren't always frequent enough and your base rifle can barely kill basic enemies but little else. Aside from that you also get a special attack that has a charge bar I was calling the RPG in my head (Rocket Porpoise Grenade) where your Dolphin flies forward doing a strong homing attack or on land you do a more powerful shot.
Now where the game gets hard is in both it's design and execution. On land your character feels stiff to control and shuffles rather than walks with no way to speed up. You can only shoot in 4 way directions despite some encounters clearly needing 8-way which I found extremely vexing often leaving me in no win unavoidable situations. The enemies will come in force from all angles leaving deaths often unavoidable and without the abilities to really deal with them except learning the game and the later levels are utterly brutal. The other modes are a lot more fluid for both underwater sections feeling more like a shoot 'em up and the dolphin Riding sequences which are a genuine blast to speed though. Even then though you can't fire backwards sometimes leaving you open to attack from the enemy encounters which was also a small annoyance. If it wasn't for the Dreamcast port I would never have beaten this as it has infinite continues and in places I just died endlessly.
I guess overall no matter how I look at it this is a good looking fun game that's a bit weird but there isn't a lot here that I don't think to myself Metal Slug already did and better. Certainly worth a playthrough for run and gun fans or people that like playing obscure retro games like me but it's not quite the hidden gem I was hoping.
+ Dolphins!
+ Great visual style and colours, striking looking game.
+ Dolphin riding!
- Too hard for me in the latter half.
- Stiff characters on land and no 8-way directional shooting. Really?
Evidently some former Metal Slug developers had the same thought when making this run and gun for Sammy Corporation in the early 2000s. Initially only released in arcades on Sammy's Atmoiswave arcade boards but later ported to Dreamcast by fans a few years ago to allow more people to experience it. Though adding in it's own unique ideas Dolphin Blue is such a close representation of Metal Slug you would think it was actually a spin off by SNK themselves. The military uniforms, guns and even the sound effects in places sound like they are just samples taken from it's influential forebear.
You get two characters to potentially play as, Erio an Arms Dealer and Anne a soldier. Regardless of who you play as in this adventure you will shoot through hordes of soldiers as they kidnap the Kingdom's Princess as the main premise. The most striking thing about Dolphin Blue are the visuals. It uses a mixture of chunky 3D backgrounds with 2D sprite characters and it's a gorgeous mix. Whilst the sprite work isn't the best I have seen of that era the colours and contrast with it's backgrounds make the game a real looker to play through. There is a lot going on at any one time with a lot of action and enemies on screen. A lot of the humour of the Metal Slug games is present such as scuba diver enemies suits inflating up when damaged and soldiers dangling precariously off of runaway trains in a very comic fashion. The levels themselves are pretty memorable with flooded mines, battleships, airships in a 1940's style diesel punk aesthetic.
There are only 5 levels but there only needs to be because this game is bloody hard. There are 3 types of gameplay in it's hour or so runtime though all three are run and gun type of foot, swimming or dolphin riding. Each have the same principle of shooting enemies, stabbing them if they get close whilst picking up some weapon power ups like Vulcans, missiles or firecracker grenades. These weapons have limited ammo and though frequent aren't always frequent enough and your base rifle can barely kill basic enemies but little else. Aside from that you also get a special attack that has a charge bar I was calling the RPG in my head (Rocket Porpoise Grenade) where your Dolphin flies forward doing a strong homing attack or on land you do a more powerful shot.
Now where the game gets hard is in both it's design and execution. On land your character feels stiff to control and shuffles rather than walks with no way to speed up. You can only shoot in 4 way directions despite some encounters clearly needing 8-way which I found extremely vexing often leaving me in no win unavoidable situations. The enemies will come in force from all angles leaving deaths often unavoidable and without the abilities to really deal with them except learning the game and the later levels are utterly brutal. The other modes are a lot more fluid for both underwater sections feeling more like a shoot 'em up and the dolphin Riding sequences which are a genuine blast to speed though. Even then though you can't fire backwards sometimes leaving you open to attack from the enemy encounters which was also a small annoyance. If it wasn't for the Dreamcast port I would never have beaten this as it has infinite continues and in places I just died endlessly.
I guess overall no matter how I look at it this is a good looking fun game that's a bit weird but there isn't a lot here that I don't think to myself Metal Slug already did and better. Certainly worth a playthrough for run and gun fans or people that like playing obscure retro games like me but it's not quite the hidden gem I was hoping.
+ Dolphins!
+ Great visual style and colours, striking looking game.
+ Dolphin riding!
- Too hard for me in the latter half.
- Stiff characters on land and no 8-way directional shooting. Really?
combat is a massive improvement from yakuza like a dragon, the story was really good but it kinda fell off during the second half, especially ichiban's story since after kiryu leaves most of his story is just running away from the bad guys and nothing really happens, most of the villains were really boring except for yamai, and ebina really needed more screentime
i loved the kiryu bucket list thing
also kiryu's ending sucked ass
i loved the kiryu bucket list thing
also kiryu's ending sucked ass
Genuinely the most disappointing game I've ever played. It promises so many things in the trailer but so little comes to fruition.
The gameplay is probably the best aspect of this entry, and it's not even that good. It's fun for a couple hours but starts to become repetitive and mindless. Having the game alter between two protagonists is also really annoying because you have to keep switching out your equipment.
The characters do not get any development, except for Chitose. Not the party nor the main antagonists, which are also just really boring and generic. They're barely present in the story and don't have any interesting dynamics with the cast, and the plot is as good as the antagonists.
Lastly, the ending is another beast of its own. I didn't think it was possible to write an ending worse than LAD7's but here we are. To keep it as spoiler free as possible: if you were interested in this game for the satisfying conclusion it promised, you'll be as disappointed as I was because there is no conclusion.
Everything is just kind of brushed off because RGG wanted to play it safe.
I do not recommend this game. It is seriously not worth the time or money and I regret falling for the hype and buying it day 1.
The gameplay is probably the best aspect of this entry, and it's not even that good. It's fun for a couple hours but starts to become repetitive and mindless. Having the game alter between two protagonists is also really annoying because you have to keep switching out your equipment.
The characters do not get any development, except for Chitose. Not the party nor the main antagonists, which are also just really boring and generic. They're barely present in the story and don't have any interesting dynamics with the cast, and the plot is as good as the antagonists.
Lastly, the ending is another beast of its own. I didn't think it was possible to write an ending worse than LAD7's but here we are. To keep it as spoiler free as possible: if you were interested in this game for the satisfying conclusion it promised, you'll be as disappointed as I was because there is no conclusion.
Everything is just kind of brushed off because RGG wanted to play it safe.
I do not recommend this game. It is seriously not worth the time or money and I regret falling for the hype and buying it day 1.
Kirby's Dream Land 2
1995
The first time I ever beat this game was back in 2022. After playing Forgotten Land when it launched, and really enjoying that, I was still in a Kirby mood and decided to beat one of the few mainline games I haven't already. While not bad overall, I found this notably weaker than Dreamland 1 for several reasons. I was a bit generous back then tho and gave it a 6 like I did Dreamland 1. Well coming back to it again, yeah It's still weaker than Dreamland 1 and I'm dropping it to a 5 now.
That's not to say there aren't some things this game improved on compared to 1. Overall, Kirby feels better to control in this one which is nice. While I'm nostalgic for the first game's ost, this game might have it beat overall. Sure it reuses a lot of tracks from Dreamland 1 and Adventure, however it's original tracks are actually really damn good. Coo's Theme is the real standout here, goddamn is that some good shit. Visually it also looks nicer than Dreamland 1 I'd say, though still doesn't look that great overall since it's still a Gameboy game.
The main thing this game added though were the animal friends. The aforementioned Koo the owl, Kine the fish and Rick the hamster are the three buddies in this game. They're a fun addition and change the gameplay up. Since copy abilities are back, each animal friend actually has their own version of each one. They greatly vary in usage though. Koo with parasol is amazing while Rick with needle is most of the time awful. It's a cool idea, that gets expanded on way more in Dreamland 3, however the execution here is very hit and miss.
Something you can use these animal friends abilities on are copy ability specific blocks. These usually block the main collectable in this game, the rainbow drops. To get 100% in this game, and fight the true final boss, you must get them all. Let me tell you, some of them are a huge pain to get. Not only are the later ones cryptic, the one where you have to use Kine + electric is just straight BS sometimes because of what you have to do to get it. If you know you know, but either way you most likely won't be getting these without a guide.
Other than that, the game just goes on for way too long I feel. To beat Dreamland 1, it takes around and hour or less (most likely a half hour) which is perfect for the type of game this is. Dreamland 2 might improve on 1's controls a bit, but it's still a Gameboy game and it's around 4 hours long to full complete everything. That's way longer and as such it just drags on near the end. That, plus the level design can be very hit or miss. Most of the levels are passable I'd say, however the game really loves its auto scrolling levels and these can be a bitch sometimes with it being a Gameboy game. And of course there's the infamous auto-scroller with the instakill dead ends that is pure trial and error and yeah that one is pure dogshit.
Along with the rainbow drops, to get 100% you have to also do these star collecting minigames and also find the female Gooey once. Gooey is this blobby guy that replaces an animal buddy if it gives you the one you already have. He just gives you some health back if you collect him. However there's a 1/8 chance it'll be a female Gooey instead and finding her actually contributes to 100% which is weird but easy to do in a certain level luckily. The star minigames you can do after going into the boss door again after you've beaten them. You have to collect every star and get a perfect in every world because this contributes to 100%. The minigames themselves are fine enough, however if you get hit or miss a star, you can't play it again until you go and beat a stage. I get why they do this as it's easy to grind lives if this wasn't in place, however the fact you have to do this for 100% just means it wastes time if you lose which isn't fun.
This is the first in the Dark Matter trilogy and so after we defeat Dedede at the end, we get to fight Dark Matter for the first time. Get used to doing that as he's a regular throughout the trilogy ofc. I remember the fight being more frustrating back in 2022, but here it wasn't too bad. Decent introduction to them as a main antagonist of the trilogy.
While I quite like Dreamland 1 and 3, I don't have much of a connection to 2 at all and I personally think it's a lot more flawed compared to those two games. It improves on some things from 1 but is also way longer and drags on because of that. Not to mention it's annoying to 100%. It's not a terrible sequel but I personally think it's a downgrade compared to 1 even if the animal friends and copy abilities being here are nice. I'll take 1 any day of the week over this.
That's not to say there aren't some things this game improved on compared to 1. Overall, Kirby feels better to control in this one which is nice. While I'm nostalgic for the first game's ost, this game might have it beat overall. Sure it reuses a lot of tracks from Dreamland 1 and Adventure, however it's original tracks are actually really damn good. Coo's Theme is the real standout here, goddamn is that some good shit. Visually it also looks nicer than Dreamland 1 I'd say, though still doesn't look that great overall since it's still a Gameboy game.
The main thing this game added though were the animal friends. The aforementioned Koo the owl, Kine the fish and Rick the hamster are the three buddies in this game. They're a fun addition and change the gameplay up. Since copy abilities are back, each animal friend actually has their own version of each one. They greatly vary in usage though. Koo with parasol is amazing while Rick with needle is most of the time awful. It's a cool idea, that gets expanded on way more in Dreamland 3, however the execution here is very hit and miss.
Something you can use these animal friends abilities on are copy ability specific blocks. These usually block the main collectable in this game, the rainbow drops. To get 100% in this game, and fight the true final boss, you must get them all. Let me tell you, some of them are a huge pain to get. Not only are the later ones cryptic, the one where you have to use Kine + electric is just straight BS sometimes because of what you have to do to get it. If you know you know, but either way you most likely won't be getting these without a guide.
Other than that, the game just goes on for way too long I feel. To beat Dreamland 1, it takes around and hour or less (most likely a half hour) which is perfect for the type of game this is. Dreamland 2 might improve on 1's controls a bit, but it's still a Gameboy game and it's around 4 hours long to full complete everything. That's way longer and as such it just drags on near the end. That, plus the level design can be very hit or miss. Most of the levels are passable I'd say, however the game really loves its auto scrolling levels and these can be a bitch sometimes with it being a Gameboy game. And of course there's the infamous auto-scroller with the instakill dead ends that is pure trial and error and yeah that one is pure dogshit.
Along with the rainbow drops, to get 100% you have to also do these star collecting minigames and also find the female Gooey once. Gooey is this blobby guy that replaces an animal buddy if it gives you the one you already have. He just gives you some health back if you collect him. However there's a 1/8 chance it'll be a female Gooey instead and finding her actually contributes to 100% which is weird but easy to do in a certain level luckily. The star minigames you can do after going into the boss door again after you've beaten them. You have to collect every star and get a perfect in every world because this contributes to 100%. The minigames themselves are fine enough, however if you get hit or miss a star, you can't play it again until you go and beat a stage. I get why they do this as it's easy to grind lives if this wasn't in place, however the fact you have to do this for 100% just means it wastes time if you lose which isn't fun.
This is the first in the Dark Matter trilogy and so after we defeat Dedede at the end, we get to fight Dark Matter for the first time. Get used to doing that as he's a regular throughout the trilogy ofc. I remember the fight being more frustrating back in 2022, but here it wasn't too bad. Decent introduction to them as a main antagonist of the trilogy.
While I quite like Dreamland 1 and 3, I don't have much of a connection to 2 at all and I personally think it's a lot more flawed compared to those two games. It improves on some things from 1 but is also way longer and drags on because of that. Not to mention it's annoying to 100%. It's not a terrible sequel but I personally think it's a downgrade compared to 1 even if the animal friends and copy abilities being here are nice. I'll take 1 any day of the week over this.