I knew this game hadn't been received well, but given that it was free on PSN+ this month, I thought I'd give it a shot. It actually opens strong. The world and lore and premise seemed pretty cool. But man does it have some issues. I made it about 2/3 of the way through the game before tapping out. The combat is just a mess of particle effects and screen filling colors. I get what they're going for: Doom Eternal but with Harry Potter spells. But they only got the formula about 50% of the way there. It just doesn't work. And it certainly isn't helped by some absolutely awful writing. We're talking well below MCU quip standards here. Also, at a pivotal point, the protagonist makes an absolutely terrible decision that the player has no control over. Then you spend a half hour getting reamed out about it even though you didn't even want to do it in the first place. It's just... not fun. Throw in some terrible performance and weak generic open-world filler activities and you've got yourself a game that I can't really recommend even at the price of zero dollars.

It's always a weird experience to not connect with a game that everyone else seems to love. But this game just did nothing for me. I really had to force myself to finish it, to be quite honest. It's just... too... long. Everything takes longer than it should. So many unskippable and incredibly slow animations. Every quest is padded to an insane degree. The entire design of the game revolves around justifying the bad decision to break a single game into three so they can charge you triple the price. The open world filler stuff is truly dire. The story has already devolved into pure anime nonsense after two games. There were so many points during my playthrough that as I pushed onward, I sat there thinking, 'man I really wish this was an RE4R style remake that was just the same game but better.' I guess it just wasn't for me. The music is amazing and some of the cutscenes were incredibly well-directed, but on the whole... this just isn't FF7. It's a Kingdom Hearts game (with all the negative that entails) with a FF7 total conversion mod on it. Ironically, this year's Like a Dragon IW is a far, far better Final Fantasy game than the actual FF game we got.

These all-time classics deserved better. It... sorta works. Firing up an instant action match or Galactic Conquest for a bit is undeniably fun. But then you notice that they still haven't fixed a 20-year old bug on Naboo. Half your AI team is just standing around doing nothing. The sound randomly cuts out in the menus. I'm not a big multiplayer guy but I think we all know how that went. They really should have gone all out for this... polishing and adding options to enable the most popular community mods. It would have been huge. Instead it's... whatever this is. Also, I know this sounds oddly petty, but: the new font in BF2 is a war crime.