are you using your time to properly think and talk with art? are you listening? or do you plug your ears anytime it tries to talk with you, to challenge you and make you rethink what you're engaging with?

i don't think i have any common ground with most people who like videogames, actually. but i don't think this is just videogames anymore, this is endemic in all of the arts. people stopped being listeners, started being consumers. no long a plot twist will make your heart skip a beat, now it's the author "betraying" your trust. no longer can complicated concept be presented before your public, now you're "fumbling", "overdesigning" or whatever new word people will invent to use as analytical shortcuts. like, really, you spent 90h with this game and all you could get back from it was that it has "Ubisoft-like" design because it has towers? i don't care if you gave the game 4 or 5 stars or if that was a compliment, is it that hard to think more about it? am i setting the bar too high? probably.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is not a product, it's an art piece which you converse with (that's honestly 99.9% of games too btw). hefty admission price for sure, but it does not need to cater to you at any moment. it needs to be heard, seen, felt, I think running around the grasslands felt incredible and vibrant, i love how every map changes its whole design based on the chocobos, i love how sidequests have their own little songs to them with battle music included, i love how every character gets explored a whole ton more because now they have the time to do so, I love how Tifa can be herself instead of Cloud's past, I liked every change, I think this game is probably one of the most courageous games ever made and that will ever be made and people won't appreciate it enough, but that's fine because I will.

the more i think about it, the more i think about its last hours, the more i think how they handled -that moment- the more I like it. I like this and Remake for entirely different reasons, but Rebirth made me feel things I don't think i was even aware I could feel playing a game and I don't mean crying i cry for everything and i cried super hard at several moments in this game, it's something else, which i would only dare to explain if I had spoilered this text but i don't want to do so.

like i said i think i finally realized my lack of common ground is what makes it really hard to talk about videogames outside of my circle, people who only wear "videogames are art!!" as a mantle for feeling validated, but not really treating them much differently than the hamburger they'll buy for lunch. i don't mind if you didn't like the game but i only ask for something of substance, an interesting read, at the very least a personal perspective, not internet gaming buzzwords i can see in like 60 other reviews. i just want to think and challenge myself and i feel like i'm always going into a hivemind. but i guess that's fine i get to cherish good things when i see them at least.

i just need to remind myself of this

not quite my tempo. firstly, you'll have to forgive the uncharitable level of cynicism i walked into this with - the combination of 'scott pilgrim developers' and 'love letter to konami beat 'em ups' had me a little on edge despite the obvious appreciation of the source material shredder's revenge is anchored upon. still, what i quickly found instead was rather unexpected: turtles in time by way of denjin makai. tribute's real sleight of hand here is they've really only sought to give a slight facelift to the konami beat 'em up formula. the enemy count is still ludicrously high, bosses still come fully stocked with super armor, attacks are still stubby...and while these were failings or caveats of the arcade lineage shredder's revenge descends from, here they've been recontextualized as part and parcel of the experience, trials made to be overcome through strength rather than coin. a clear effort's been made to integrate every prerequisite tool for success, which unfortunately included a dodge, but hey, what are you gonna do. fans of constant offence as a means of defence will have plenty to chew on here - the simplistic kits of these characters lend themselves nicely to extended combo strings and artfully dodging barrages of attacks/obstacles - but if you're looking for something a bit more intimate than a button pressing bonanza, i felt it was a bit lacking. it's hard for me to state it's anything more than a competently directed take on castle crashers.

Konami beat-em-ups SUCK - they're impactless quarter-munchers that coast on their copious amounts of IP fanservice. Turtles 1 in arcade, Simpsons, Vendetta, X-Men, - can't stomach even a little bit of them without losing my mind, and their place in retro culture permanently contimated beatemups' reputation as a mindless button-masher genre.

But Turtles in Time on SNES? It's good. The action hits hard and fast, the stage design is timelessly iconic, the bosses are solid, most of Konami's long-running issues with hitbox and enemy design feel so much cleaner here - and DAMN, the TUNES.

Why this is the one good Konami joint? Who knows. My guess is, with Final Fight and Streets of Rage making waves, the bar was getting set high and they had to clean up their act. It's not too uncommon for console versions of brawlers to reign in the arcade jank, either.

It's still too repetitive tho - even with the occasional golem and robot enemies, it's hard to stay invested in beating up faceless foot clan dudes for 9 whole stages. The I-frames suck and lead to one too many deaths caused by collateral enemy charges. They give you so many continues and lives that there's basically no way to game over, but you still have to restart a stage after losing all your lives anyway - like c'mon man, you gave me the keys to the kingdom, get rid of the potholes while you're at it.

It's still a Konami beatemup, but it like, fires enough really striking neurons for that to be okay.

I have beaten Streets of Rage 2 a bunch of times since completing Streets of Rage 4 a bunch of times, because Streets of Rage 4 more or less trains you on how to play Streets of Rage 1, 2 & 3 correctly.

Game fans, myself included, often bounce off of old arcade-style beat ‘em ups because they can initially appear impossible to beat without reaching for the save-state. But we often forget Streets of Rage 2 and its contemporaries were designed to be appreciated again and again until you reached some state of mastery. Streets of Rage 2 was designed to be bought by your mum for £50 and played by you every day after school until Mr. X finally ate dirt. Streets of Rage 2 was not designed to be included in a 40-game Mega Drive all-you-can-game buffet that you can buy on Steam for £2.49 right now or enjoy for “free” as part of the Nintendo Switch Online Sega Mega Drive Expansion Package Plus for Nintendo Switch or whatever it’s called. You don’t have time to try Stage 3 of Streets of Rage 2 again - you need to go over there and play ToeJam & Earl 2 in its original Japanese translation, for some reason!

No, I say! Stay here and learn your Streets of Rage, kid. Because mastering a beam ‘em up always feels great! A good beam ‘em up often boils down to something between a fighting game and a puzzle game - figuring out what each enemy’s weakness is, considering the order in which to exploit these weaknesses, and then executing the correct badass moves under pressure from the advancing mob. It’s like Tetris, but the blocks are made out of punches and broken bottles. It’s beautiful.

This time round on Streets of Rage 2, I sleepwalked through the opening few stages without taking a single hit. I didn’t even realise I’d done it until I checked out how many lives I’d accumulated. Apparently I’d just been effortlessly side-stepping Galsias and out-ranging Donovans without even consciously doing it, applying some hybrid martial art that stands somewhere between the so-called “Tetris effect” and that bit in The Matrix Reloaded where Neo is just effortlessly ducking and stepping those Agent Smiths. Pro Gamer Shit.

Just kidding. I don’t consider myself a pro at Streets of Rage 2 by any stretch - but after playing through the game six or seven times with my brain turned on, I realised Streets of Rage 2 had trained me so well that I’d internalised all the natures and patterns of the game’s opening enemies. Folks, that’s some Good Game Design! And we haven’t even talked about the Good Design of the music or the artwork yet!

One thing this play-through of Streets of Rage 2 made me think about was how well Streets of Rage 2 serves as a perfect historical relic of its era and specific place in that era - a pixel-art tableau of early 1990s house/rave/hip hop culture on the east coast of America. More specifically, early 1990s house/rave/hip hop culture on the east coast of America as viewed by an incredibly talented, classically-trained Japanese designer and composer who could see that computers and video games represented the future. Streets of Rage 2 is how people outside of America saw this side of America in this era, and every era since - through film and music and video games. It’s fascinating to see what essential truths and dreams made it across the ocean to us. I think this game has genuine cultural worth that scholars in halls grander than Backloggd’s will one day celebrate.

About 8 years after Streets of Rage 2 made its own history, Japan’s Takeshi Kitano made a film called Brother. Brother was Takeshi Kitano’s first film outside of Japan, and was set in Los Angeles with a half-American, half-Japanese cast. As a hands-on director, writer and actor, there’s no doubt that Brother represents Kitano’s vision of Los Angeles and America at large. Check it out! It’s good! Exactly like Streets of Rage 2, Brother serves as a celluloid time capsule of America’s international cultural impact and influence at a specific point in time - and it’s quite striking how much had changed in the space of the 8 years between 1992 and the year 2000. Brother is one of Kitano’s lesser-appreciated films, but I think that film has genuine cultural worth that scholars in halls grander than Letterboxd’s will one day celebrate.

So, there you have it - an arcade beat ‘em up game with beautiful, artistic complexity of beat ‘em up game design, sharing bytes in the same cartridge with one of the most important cultural artefacts of the early 1990s. Still wanna fuck around with Toe Jam & Earl? C’mon man.

Super mixed feelings on Doom 64. On one hand, I love the murky, muddy aesthetic and the spookier atmosphere, but I don't think it matches with classic Doom gameplay and the level design is a massive downgrade.

Compared to Doom I and II, 64 is a much gloomier game. Gone are the rip-roaring synthesised guitars and vibrant designs of red, yellow and white levels- in their place are grinding atmospheric tracks and deep greens, purples, greys and browns. I actually really like this change, it makes 64 feel distinct from its predecessors and makes it feel almost like a transitory game between the confident bloodbaths before and the grimy horror of Doom 3- but the gameplay is still the same as 1 and 2, which feels like a bit of a mismatch to me.
Doom 3's commitment to horror aesthetics is paired with much slower, tenser gameplay that lets both pop more, complimenting each other. In contrast, 64's gunplay is the same lightning-fast ballet of bullets that preceded it, but its aesthetics don't quite match. The dim lighting and the rumbling, eerie soundtrack are disconnected from the frantic killing sprees you've been accustomed to and I think if they went all the way in one direction it would have been good- as it stands, 64 is tonally confused.

The level design has also taken a massive hit. Levels are significantly longer than in previous games and loop back in labyrinthian fashion frequently. Now, Doom is no stranger to levels winding in on themselves, but it was mixed with shorter, more linear levels that had more action- compared to 1 and 2, 64 has much more wandering about looking for the next leg of the level, which is a real bummer. If you know where you're going in Dooms 1 & 2 you can wrap a level up in a few minutes, tops. Not in 64.

I really appreciate Doom 64 not wanting to be cookie-cutter in its aesthetics, but I think its level design falls flat compared to its legendary predecessors. Still alright, though.

this is nowhere near as bad as everyone says it is. There is just a loud portion of people who hate things that are different and persuade the majority that this game sucks. It really doesn't, and is truly worthy of being part of the series.
- The main reason for this is that it takes out all of the monotony out of the battles. Instead of me having to physically go and select cure every turn, I can instead just get Hope to switch to medic and he does it automatically. The macro level battle system places the focus on what's more important: strategy. It's about what roles my characters fulfill at any one point in the battle. I don't get bogged down in having to select specific commands every turn. Like yeah, that option is there, but there's really no need to do so once you have scanned an enemy. All the Final Fantasy elements are there, they're just presented in a new way, and there's nothing wrong with the thirteenth game in a series trying something new. Granted, the whole "if the party member dies that's a game over" is kind of annoying, that often only happens when I was trying to kill something way too powerful at that point in the game (cough cough Zinitra).
- The 'hallway simulator' argument doesn't really bother me either. There's enough side paths to break up the linearity, and I'm the kind of person who looks up dungeon maps anyway, as I can't stand the idea that I might have missed a chest. There are a few points where the game risked becoming a slog, but those were pretty limited. But I don't know why people complain about this, because X was a giant hallway too, and that hid it about as well as this game did. Both games are almost the same in terms of linearity. The crystarium system is basically just a more streamlined sphere grid.
- the story is fine. I'll be honest, after Oerba, I got completely lost narrative wise, but the only third act in the series that hasn't made me very confused is VI. This plot was cool, from what I understood of it: an interesting hypothetical of what would happen if we had gods that were intentionally antagonistic. It is perhaps a bit too melodramatic in places, but that's understandable, seeing as the characters are undergoing a massive amount of trauma. Some of their coping mechanisms don't really make sense, and Vanille's voice is perhaps a bit too annoying, but I did as a whole enjoy my experience with this game. It has a real cinematic feel because of the settings and the battle system, and that really enhances the Final Fantasy experience in my opinion.
- The job system is nice. It provides the bread and butter roles of the franchise in an easy to understand package. The game takes its time to introduce each job, so that you know what each one does. I appreciate that. I also REALLY appreciate how they handled status effects in this game. No debuffs can outright cheese anything, so the game doesn't really have a need to make bosses immune to everything (looking at you, Final Fantasy XII). Debuffs and buffs actually serve a purpose in this game, they're not mere afterthoughts. Even the final boss can have debuffs put on them! It really blends with the whole strategy thing from earlier, where because there is a macro-level focus, the game just allows to throw more generalised debuffs around the place that actually do meaningful stuff.
- I only really have two complaints, the first one of which is the weapon upgrade system. It's a bit annoying to have to upgrade a weapon to see if it's going to actually be of any use. And upgrading weapons and accessories basically just boils down to pumping a whole lot of money into one. And most of the time I didn't really feel a noticeable difference though.
- The other gripe I'd have is that some of the hunts on Gran Pulse are a bit too backtrack heavy. The underground mines wasn't any more interesting the fifth time I had to go up and down it's linear corridors. If they had allowed fast travel between any completed crystals, that would have eliminated a lot of pointless backtracking through weak enemies that just get in my way
- The music was fine. It's probably my least favourite OST in the franchise, as there's only two tracks I can actually hum the melody to. Barthandelus' boss fight music is admittedly a bop.
- Lastly, I really like the vibe of the world in this game. The futuristic city/attire of Cocoon was somehting I think was missing in previous games, as there is only so many ways you can show castles and mountains until they start to get boring. Like true, there aren't any towns in this game, but I think that works with the story and isolated feel the game has going for it. It wouldn't really make sense for Cocoon citizens to just politely sell potions to these wanted criminals. And Pulse is supposed to be a barren wasteland, and putting a town there would have backtracked on that point that they were drilling into us for half the game.
And there actually ARE towns in this game. There's three of them that you go through in the game: Palumpolum, Nautilus and Oerba. They each serve a narrative purpose in the game, and you do get to hear the NPCs perspectives on you in two of those instances. The only difference with these towns is that they are a) citites and b) don't need to serve the same purpose, as you can buy literally anything from save stations. This is actually an improvement over X, as in that game, you could only buy items at towns, and had to go long stretches stuck with the items you had.

tl;dr: this game is fun, you guys are just mean.

When you go into a corridor simulator hoping it's not really a corridor simulator so you can prove people wrong, but it ends up actually being a corridor simulator.

Final Fantasy XIII... one of the most discussed games in the series, and not usually in a positive way. I'd heard so many extreme opinions on this game that I really wasn't sure what to expect, who to believe, how exaggerated the opinions were etc etc—all I knew for sure is that it had a banger soundtrack and cool science fantasy aesthetic. So did I end up liking it? Yeah, mostly. People aren't lying about its flaws, and it's a very odd game in a lot of respects, but personally I think this is one of the better games in the series and has a lot of strong aspects that push through its weaknesses. Now, let's get into specifics!

Yep, corridors. Coming from FFXII, I wasn't exactly against a more linear game, especially after enjoying how FFX handled that, but... FFXIII is really fucking linear. Not only is almost every dungeon a corridor with the odd split to lead you to a dead end of treasure, but there are no towns, no minigames, practically no npcs to chat with, no real sidequests for the vast majority of the game—it's absolutely desolate. All you have is combat, combat, combat. It's a little much. The worst example of this is easily the Gapra Whitewood, an absurdly long and repetitive dungeon with little in the way of cutscenes or unique environments, and an area I could not blame anyone from dropping the game on the spot. I think all this would have been an absolute deal breaker if it weren't for two very important caveats: firstly, the presentation of this game is GORGEOUS. Each area looks beyond stunning and screams "this is what true fantasy should look like!" with its dazzling spectacles, landscapes, abstract fantastical constructs, and this is all further enhanced by the ethereal soundtrack that boasts some of the greatest music in the series with some of the greatest music in gaming.

Secondly, the combat is SO. GOOD. By the time I unlocked paradigm shifts I legit struggled to stop playing this game, the high level strategic depth of this combat is crazy and encourages a completely different level of thinking than I'm used to in other RPGs. Instead of instructing your party members in individual actions, whether via menus or action commands, you are instead instructing their job stances and rapidly adjusting these on the fly. There's the option to input your own commands manually for your lead character, but I imagine this is more useful for high level play, as I found auto battle to be very intelligent and did what I wanted 99% of the time. Unfortunately, FF13 kind of weighs down its own combat with its stubborn insistence on near-complete synergy between gameplay and story—the structure of its narrative inevitably forces you into specific parties, often duos of two, and after experiencing a party of three the battles feel so much worse, limiting you significantly in strategy. I assume part of the intention was to train you on the pros/cons of different role combinations and encourage mastery, but it's simply overkill how long it takes to get the training wheels off to return to a party of three.

Buuut on the positive side, this game is actually pretty hard. I constantly got close to/reached the crystarium cap for each section, and still had to think really hard on the bosses to not get absolutely swept. It forces you to engage in all its systems and not look away for a second, or else your party may find itself quite dead! In theory you would think that healing you completely after every battle and being able to instantly restart each one on failure would make the game easy, but this is the completely opposite, as the developers use this to make every single basic mob fight very challenging, emphasising difficulty less on resource management/stamina and more on in the moment strategy. It's actually pretty genius, and ticks off an important part of game design psychology that I feel many games do not understand—the easier and faster you make it for a player to continue after failure, the more encouraged they'll be to push through challenges. As a dopamine-deficient individual, that applies triply to me, making games with overly long restart times/punishing checkpoints nearly unplayable without save states, so I appreciate the lengths FF13 goes to offer a seamless experience.

Once you hit That One Area where the gameplay really opens up, well that's where it really shined for me, I spent like 15 hours in that place before moving on with the story. I'm really excited to get back and do the postgame hunts there, though I don't think I'm quite insane enough to 5 star all of them. It's also quite fun once you understand how the equipment system actually works (because the game sure doesn't do a good job at explaining it), and you can give your party members neat little abilities and stat boosts to enhance their combat. Not to mention the crystarium is deceptively linear, and actually gives you a decent bit of freedom in what to focus on, especially the further you get into the game.

So yeah, gameplay was a big hit for me. Big enough for me to spend like 35 hours in a corridor simulator and somehow enjoy it. Of course there's a few other weaknesses such as repetitive enemy designs, weapons that feel designed to make you hate playing as certain characters due to their negative synergy with said character, etc etc, but overall I don't think any of these were big enough to detract from my enjoyment of the overall systems.

Now... for the characters! And story! Uhhh, I'm not even going to bother talking about this without spoilers, so


SPOILER SECTION BEGINS HERE

I'll cut right to the chase: the journey of FFXIII is extremely character-focused, to the point of being actively detrimental to the world building, plot and lore. This is a very positive aspect of the game that enamoured me, as I love a good cast of flawed human beings that learn to be better through interpersonal conflicts and facing their worst fears in the worst manner possible. This is where FFXIII truly thrives, and I need to go through each character one-by-one to fully get my thoughts across.

Starting with Lightning, on the surface she feels like the sequel to Squall who was the sequel to Cloud, but this shallow preconception quickly vanished for me as it shone a light on her deeper issues. At her core Lightning is a person who wishes to come across as strong, craves a goal that will allow her to pursue a linear course of action without having to confront her inner demons, and deeply loves her sister—which causes her no end of grief when she's confronted with the fact that she didn't listen to her, and refused to help in her time of need. This regret is what drives her to seek revenge against the Sanctum, lest she drives herself to despair in self-loathing. Her arc throughout the game is less about her changing as a person, and more about her reconsidering her relationships with others: specifically Snow, Serah and Hope.

This leads right into Snow, Lightning's direct foil. Unlike her own cynical nature, his ideals are naïve to the point of being detrimental and hurting others, with both their stubbornness leading to many conflicts throughout the game. Lightning treats Snow as an outlet to blame for Serah's fate, but after their long journey together they develop an understanding and Lightning views Snow's unyielding optimism as a plus, accepting that him and Serah are a perfect match. A key moment for Snow is during the finale where he's confronted with his gang, and they judge him not by his status as a l'cie but by the hero they've always known—a theme I'll cover in more depth later.

Of course, you can't talk about Snow's arc without Hope. I sort of get criticisms of his arc to an extent, as yes it is born from a misunderstanding of Snow's intentions, but honestly I found it pretty organic and thought they did a good job at presenting the misunderstanding, as well as conveying why Hope would continue to blame Snow even after it becomes decently clear that he's a good guy that regretted the death of his mother. The build up of Hope's loathing for Snow leads to an absolutely fantastic climax where Hope is about to kill Snow, they both get blasted away, and Snow still saves Hope's life without hesitation after realising he was the son of the woman he couldn't protect, which of course forces Hope to understand Snow's true nature, while this entire ideal gets Snow to confront his naivety and admit he needs to change.

This all evidently mirrors the relationship between Sazh and Vanille: Sazh regrets nothing more than having his son become a Cocoon l'cie, and Vanille desperately tries to hide her responsibility in the matter. And it's not just a matter of her blaming herself for something that wasn't really her responsibility—no, Vanille indirectly caused this when she choose to lie to Fang, and set these events in motion. While you can't necessarily entirely blame her for the outcome, it's also clear that she holds some responsibility and should be held accountable: something she realises more than anyone. When Sazh is finally confronted with the truth after his son tragically turns to crystal, he in turn realises that killing Vanille will accomplish nothing, and she must atone for her mistakes.

Vanille's relationship with Fang is a bit of a similar story: as mentioned, Vanille hides the truth from Fang in a presumptuous attempt to stop her from feeling responsible for becoming Ragnarok, which Fang eventually works out on her own and hashes it out with her girlfriend, before they tearfully embrace. Now in terms of Fang herself, she's admittedly a weak link due to being more of an extension of Vanille than driven by a particular goal like other members of the cast, but I do think she gets a cool moment in the finale where she turns against everything they had built until that point in an attempt to save Vanille. Unfortunately the portrayal of this moment is... really bizarre, more on that later.

As I've just demonstrated, the strength of this cast is in the way they connect to each other—no character develops on their own, and their changes/personal revelations are instead the result of interpersonal conflicts that are born from many weaknesses. This may be a very fundamental aspect of storytelling, yes, but the way FF13 handles it is exceptional and is a masterclass in developing a complex cast with nuanced relationships that organically interweave with their growth. Oh and it has a found family dynamic. I love found family dynamics!

As for the rest of the cast... well they do exist. I think Hope's dad is a neat milestone in Hope's arc, and Serah is pretty fleshed out for her limited screen time, though perhaps more in terms of her importance to other characters. The rest... eh. They serve their roles, but they aren't much more beyond that. This applies to the antagonists: the most interesting one is probably Cid, but sadly he is rather limited in his appearances, so there's only so much I have to work with here.

This intrinsically links to two things—the rather... bizarre nature the plot unfolds, and the incredibly shallow world we are presented. Let's start with the latter: Cocoon does not feel lived in at all. This is potentially a consequence of not being able to explore any towns, but I think it goes beyond that—not only am I not given any reason to care about the citizens of this place, but I also struggle to even conceive their existence. What's the everyday life of a Cocoon citizen? How does their government function beyond providing necessities/convenient propaganda for good ol' Barty? What do the effects of the seemingly-advanced technology have on society? What's the culture of the world, is it monolithic or does each town have its own customs and heritage? While I understand that they are trying to portray Cocoon as a controlled zoo of the fal'Cie's making where humanity are simple livestock, there's only so much you can get away with before the citizens of the world literally stop feeling human and only exist as cardboard narrative props. It takes the advice "a story and its world only matter because of the characters within it" to its logical extreme by making it almost solely exist for the purpose of driving the characters along their journey, and doesn't feel like it exists outside of that.

That last part applies to the plot too. There are many developments in the plot, and a lot of them are pretty interesting, most importantly serving to give the characters chances at growth and to drive them to their destination. To an extent, the linearity of the plot makes sense as Barty is quite literally guiding their journey from start to finish, controlling their free will with the Focus they have been delivered, promising them a definite fate they cannot avoid unless they become mindless monsters. In a sense, Barty is quite a devious antagonist with how he gets the party to do exactly what he wants at every turn, but it gets to the point where it's really exhausting seeing this happen over and over again, and I really felt the lack of the party's agency in the world and its plot even in the final chapter, which is truly wild lol.

Speaking of the lategame plot... what happened? For most of the game the story does feel well constructed in the ways that count, but by the time I reached Oerba village, it started to wear thin and felt as if the budget was rapidly running out. The setting of Oerba is absolutely excellent, enhanced by the evocative Dust to Dust playing in the background, along with many many bits of flavour text to give you an idea of its past culture, but... is it just me or did Vanille and Fang barely talk about the place??? We never really get specifics on their lives there (beyond Vanille's cute robot quest), and Fang in particular I have zero understanding of how she lived there, it feels like only Vanille came from this place and Fang is her imaginary girlfriend. Super disappointing to be rushed through Oerba and get so little in terms of dialogue when it should have been one of the most impactful moments in the game (which tbf, it still is even in its gutted state).

This, however, is nothing compared to the finale that follows. We are rushed back straight to Eden, herded all the way to Orphan with some brief glimpses of the odd lucky side characters that don't get yeeted off screen (assuming they even appear at all), and whoop whoop, final dungeon here we go. It does make sense that Barty would construct their journey this way, but does it make for an interesting story? I sure don't think so. It especially bothered me how half-arsed Cid's 'conclusion' was, along with his vice-captain or whatever his name was, I guess he became one of those wacky death spamming monsters ¯\(ツ)/¯

The finale itself gives a frankly dissatisfying resolution for Barty (congrats on accomplishing your goal...?), Orphan appears as an interesting metaphor for an aborted fetus that represents the collective contradiction of all Cocoon fal'Cie and blablablabla, I wish I could care about it but the execution is so all over the place. The party are placed in the most impossible situation ever, even more so than before, making me wonder how on earth they'll make it out... and they just do??? Because they get the fancy Fang brand for uh, reasons. I had to do some research because these events left me so confused—turns out Fang likely intended to prevent the party from stopping her from killing Orphan, but her attack ended up being too powerful due to Orphan enhancing it (poorly signalled), which caused the party's brands to reach stage 13 (never explained in game) due to the physical/mental stress of the incident (poorly conveyed), and thus become cie'th. Then Etro (goddess only revealed in lore reward for beating superbosses) turns them back with fancy Fang brands that won't let them turn into cie'th (not explained and lazy deus ex machina), allowing them to defeat Orphan once and for all.

I think it's a cool idea that in the end they do end up fulfilling their inevitable Focus, but immediately after before turning to crystal they Cocoon, giving Fang and Vanille a huge moment before they turn to crystal in an eternal embrace, supporting the weight of Cocoon (as 'straight' 'friends' do). This is all awesome. But then after being turned to crystal, the rest of the party... get restored in hardly any time? The only possible way to understand this without getting into sequel shenanigans is through reading the in-game lore and ultimania, where you can work out that Etro once again deus ex machina'd them back to life, woohoo. I'm not sure what's worse, whether the scenario writers wrote themselves into a corner and made up Etro to solve it, or if they planned this all along and didn't deign it worthy to set up this rather convenient poorly telegraphed solution!

I guess I'll see if I feel differently after playing the rest of the trilogy, but from this game alone, the finale is such a disappointing clusterfuck after and otherwise strong story up until then.

SPOILER SECTION ENDS HERE

Music. The music in this game is absolutely incredible, Hamauzu proves himself as a very worthy successor to Uematsu with his unique style, further evolving from his work in FFX. Saber's Edge is one of the coolest boss themes I've ever heard, Sunleth Waterscape and Archylte Steppe are beautiful area music, and there's just so many amazing event themes that really set the tone. I can't wait to hear more of his work in the sequels, even if he isn't the sole composer for them. FF sure never misses on music.

But yeah to sum it up, I really like FF13. The gameplay is fantastic and unique, graphics are gorgeous, characters are all very well constructed and engaging, and the soundtrack is a masterpiece. It's unfortunate it has some really major flaws, such as a messy finale, shallow world building, corridor structure, and rather weak side cast/villains, that really bring a game that should have been so much better down, and I can see why this game is so divisive. Despite all that, it says a lot that I was able to write so much about the story, it shows I did genuinely care enough about it to feel strongly about my criticisms. I think I land more on the positive side overall in terms of opinions, but sadly not as much as I hoped going into this game.