ff8 is a game that is very hard for me to compile my thoughts on, but i thought i might as well try now that it's been a bit since i've finished it

i can get 8 not being somebody's favorite final fantasy, but this is such a beautiful piece of art to me that it feels like most of the game's bad reputation is just a mass gaslighting campaign perpetuated by early 2000s gaming magazines and kept alive by people who are scared of earnest emotionality in their video games. not everything that happens in this game is necessarily logical and it does have its flaws—the main antagonist is good but far from the series strongest and the disc 2 twist, while not nearly as bad as anyone has ever made it out to be, is delivered a little bit clumsily—but i feel like that's in service of being such an emotionally resonant game that it can barely be seen as a downside. the story of squall and rinoa is so beautiful to me in a way that so few love stories between a man and a woman can be for me and there were multiple points where i started to tear up a bit just because of how much i loved my experience with 8's story and characters.
when it comes to ff8's gameplay the junction system is unironically one of the few times that the atb battle system has been even remotely enjoyable, and while it isn't as strong mechanically as materias from 7 and the tutorials conveying the system in game aren't the best, i think it's a bit sad how having to engage with the mechanics differently is enough to put people off to the game's combat. with just a little bit more time in the oven and an audience more willing to engage with change, the junction system would probably be one of the most celebrated battle systems in any square enix jrpg with dickriders at the level of smirk and press turn from smt, and maybe in general final fantasy 8 would be more celebrated for the amazing game that it deserves to be seen as.

also gunblades are raw as shit and are by far the coolest weapon that any square enix game has ever had don't @ me

Truly is hard to say what has not been said at this point. Sadly, I have been away quite some time thanks to life getting in the way and Final exams as well as diving in as much as I can sense I picked up this monster of a game. Hopefully now I will have some more time to focus on my backlog for a bit.

I find it very interesting that with breath of the wild I found myself losing interest in the shrines and forcing myself to try to do some of the side quests and explore a giant map with lots of open spaces. TOTK easily fixed that issue with its newer shrines that were actually fun to find and experience and this game ended up grabbing ahold to me somehow and I instantly got addicted to being able to solve different puzzles and situations all up to my own creativity. There is no one single solution to practically anything in the game and I love that. Listening to their fans and fixing nearly all the issues besides the pain in the ass durability.

The world building with the characters and fleshing out of the past sages and story scenes really gave it an extra layer of depth and made me enjoy this timeline of our Hero even more. I definitely feel like they could pull off a LoZ Jrpg with all the companions you meet that help you in your quest.

One of my biggest issues is the lack of reaction or involvement with Link as a character in any of the plot points. I completely understand he has and always will be a “silent protagonist”, but there was many missed opportunities to breathe life into one of the most badass versions of Link we have gotten, especially with how cool he was in “Age of Calamity”. More than half the time when characters talk to him in cutscenes we do not even see his face or any type of reaction, I mean come on you gotta give me something here!! Even so, the final act and epilogue truly blew me away with a battle I definitely can rank as one of the best for me at this time in the Zelda franchise and with each installment I become an even bigger fan of this series. I do feel bad for the ones who wanna play breath of the wild before this one because you may be facing some serious burnout with the amount of staggering content between the both of them.

Fantastic game all in all. My only question at this point is where’s my princess Zelda dude?! 🤷🏻 🧚‍♂️

from what i had initially played of engage, i did not at all enjoy it. i went into it with very few expectations based on the direction the series took outside of remakes after path of radiance, but still found myself largely disappointed. i found the cast and dialog mostly insufferable, the actual story itself some of the worst the series has to offer, and the flanderization of legacy characters almost insulting. however, i have a lot of friends with varying levels of experience with fire emblem saying it got good, whether that be solely the gameplay for some or the story for others. i decided to give the game another shot and finish it, hoping that at least one of thoses two camps would be right and i came out kind of disappointed in both repects, though i do have a much higher opinion of the game than i did before

in terms of story, it just gets worse. as the game goes on the already frustratingingly shallow plot continues to spiral downward, taking a break around the solm arc to catch its breath before going even faster down the shitter with everything afterwards. it's not awakening level where it's bad out of being largely boring with nothing of note ever happening and it doesn't get to being fates levels of balls to the wall bad until close to chapter 20, it's just a badly written story in a way that feels frustrating and ultimately like it was written for children. this doesn't feel like a game from the same series that had the battle of belhalla, the battle with emperor rudolf, or (even as sloppy as the writing in three houses is) the final confrontations between dimitri and edelgard. instead we get a 7 minute death scene ending in a pinky promise, or moments that have potential but just aren't able to work for me because they involve characters that everything else has lead me to be unable to stand. it especially doesn't help that i found most of the impotant characters and especially the villains to be some of my least favorite characters. usually in a fire emblem game with a boring cast, there's a really cool cast of villains to at least make things interesting half of the time or at the very least one main character who i like seeing on screen. binding blade absolutely comes to mind for me here with elffin, bern's generals, and (with the context of the manga) zephiel being some of the standout characters for me in that game and some of my favorites in the series despite the other characters around them, but in engage the lords and villains are all either really annoying, really boring, or a frustrating mixture of both and it makes the main conflict and narrative even weaker as a result.

speaking of characters i can't stand, boy there sure are a lot of them. the style of writing here is largely taking a few character traits or quirks and just running with those constantly which is already a style i don't like, but my dislike of them mostly comes down to me not liking those specific character traits, which is pretty apparent when i can't get myself to enjoy fan favorites like yunaka at all. there's also the emblems, which are all just flanderized versions of their original counterparts, with sigurd and ike being some of the more frustrating ones. there are exceptions, such as roy and eirika being just completely mischaracterized and micaiah, lucina, corrin, and byleth not having much to actually flanderize, but i wouldn't say those are positive exceptions. regardless of this lower standard of character writing, the only characters i'd say are actually flat out bad are veyle and alear. veyle is just radiant dawn blood pact levels of bad writing without any of the minor things about the blood pact that made you think "oh neat" and wrapped into an unappealing design who shows up constantly. likewise, alear also invokes a lot of fire emblem's history with sloppy writing, most specifically the my units. like most my units, they are the absolutely most important character on screen at any given time and everybody on your side has to revere them like they're some kind of god, and intelligent systems decided that instead of maybe writing my units a little differently that they would double down on the isssues these characters had and they were going to double down hard. now your my unit is literally a god who almost everyone worships or at least reveres in some capacity, not to mention that their entire personality boils down to "good-doer mary sue with a dark side" like you'd find in self insert works on fanfiction.net in the early 2000s. it honestly got super frustrating seeing a rare scene i thought was actually good just for alear to show their ugly mug and for me to lose interest completely. on a more positive note, i found myself liking a lot more characters to the level i usually do for fire emblem in this game than i ever did in awakening or fates. i wouldn't say they're the best characters ever but lapis, zelkov, goldmary, and fogado are a few standouts to me, with rosado, alcryst, and kagetsu also having a lot of things i enjoyed about them. the game definitely gets a bit more consistent with better characters as it goes, backloading most of the worse ones to firene and just sprinkling one or two stinkers into the later regions, but it can lead to long stretches with no one you actually like having anything to say depending on what you like character wise. while i think engage hits much lower lows with its characters than awakening and fates ever did, it also hits much higher highs than they did too which i guess means i surprisingly like engage's cast more than those two.

if the story just ended up getting worse for me, how about the gameplay?

it's pretty good i guess!

i definitely wouldn't put it up with new mystery or thracia gameplay wise, but it's definitely much better than awakening or three houses in that department. i'd probably place it somewhere below blazing blade and path of radiance, making it one of the better entries in the series gameplay wise in my opinion. the actually gameplay systems definitely work for what engage is. i find myself not really caring about break and no weapon durability is a little boring to me but with everything else about engage being the way it is, i much prefer being able to just jump in with minimal inventory management. the weapon triangle actually returning is very welcome, and the emblems are very fun in the same way that new mystery letting you move insane distances on its maps was fun. because of this, in sections of the game where you have no emblems or very few emblems it can be a bit boring and the game seems very intent on removing the main aspect of what makes actually playing it compelling in that regard, but the map design kinda makes it okay? i've never been too huge on the "conquest is good because it has really good map design" bandwagon that most people seem to be able to agree on, and i find myself feeling the same way about the idea that engage also has really good map design. neither game has bad map design at all, i'd say in a lot of areas they have really solid map design, i just don't think they're the peak of the series like some would allege. engage also had a lot of moments where i needed to put the game down before i was at all willing to start another map if only because i wasn't finding the gameplay enough to push me through to another cutscene i wasn't going to enjoy, but that mostly started cropping up towards the latter end of the game.
on a more minor note gameplay wise, the somniel sure is a thing i guess. i don't like the hub worlds fe has started to do but at least now it's rather unintrusive, at least compared to the complete and utter slog and narrative disaster that the monastery was. if i had my way the hubs just wouldn't be a feature, but i'm willing to take what wins i can when it comes to the social sim aspects fire emblem has leaned into.

i also thought i'd quickly touch on the music, as well as the graphics. music wise, there's very few games in this series with soundtracks i go out of my way to listen to. i only really listen to music from the jugdral titles, the three remakes, and some of three houses and even then they're far from my favorite game soundtracks. likewise, engage is just pretty okay. there's some neat parts of the ost but largely it's not one i found myself super invested in but i didn't find myself bored by it either. in terms of the graphics, while i still think the GBA games are the best looking in the series, engage definitely gets close with the battle animations and there's a lot that are really cool. the models themselves are just okay though, but they would probably be better with a different art style. on the other hand everything about the non-battle animations can only be described as laughably bad. they have this uncanny way of moving that invokes amateur SFM porn and overdramatic mocap acting and it just sucks to look at. it's genuinely baffling to me that on one hand we have the best battle animations the series has seen in almost 20 years but at the same time we're given the most low quality animations for cutscenes and dialog, but i guess it's better than nothing.

overall i think the largest thing keeping me from overall enjoying fire emblem engage is the simple fact that i am not the type of person to value gameplay over story in any type of rpg. to me, gameplay in an rpg serves to lead into and provide context for story moments to elevate it in a way that non-interactive media simply couldn't accomplish. there's plenty of rpgs i loved that i couldn't get into gameplay wise, whether it be xenogears or vagrant story or smt2. engage, however, doesn't have a good or, for lack of a better term, engaging story which leaves the gameplay very little to work with and elevate. you could argue that i'm able to just skip the cutscenes and story elements and just play the game, but at that point why i am playing engage over any other fe game? in any other genre this would be something i could look past completely, but due to the way i approach and enjoy the rpg genre as a whole i find engage an experience that i could've done without. i can understand a decent amount of the hype around this game but it isn't for me and even after giving it a second chance i find it indicative that echoes, three houses, and any future remakes are just detours on the direction that seems to be maeda's vision for this series post-awakening, and i can't say that excites me.
in terms of the series at large, unless there's any reason to believe this direction is changing i'm probably not going to be keeping an eye on it much longer outside of news in regards to remakes. i still love most of the older titles and it's a dear series for me but i can see that fire emblem has shifted to a much different audience than it used to appeal to and for now, i think engage is going to be where i get off of the wild ride that shouzo kaga started.

so long and thanks for all of the memories, you weird bastards at intsys

Majora's Maskterpiece I'd say!!

A game I have known about for quite some time since I was young and finally took to time to play through this one. I went the whole nine yards with this one collecting every mask and doing nearly every side quest and getting the fairy sword. I fucking enjoyed every minute of it and couldn't get enough of it besides learning that you have to do certain things at certain times of the day and you don't know much going in blindly. Believe me when I say it was all worth it! That eerie music that would play when you free one of the spirits and it speaks to you truly gave me chills as well as doing so many unique side quests which all grabbed my attention. Each with their own interesting side stories and dealing with the despair that goes with it. Truly Majora's mask wasn't the only thing evil around these parts. What's up with that Rolf-sounding mailman though? He is supposed to be quick yet my cat shits faster than it takes him to make a delivery, whatsupwiththat!? At first, the whole time thing with the 3 days would dissuade me to jump in earlier, but once I took the time to actually play and learn the game I grew accustomed to it. If you are new to this Zelda don't let it throw you off! All those little edgelord kids in middle school were right about this one!! God-Tier Zelda eaaasily! (But where was Zelda? Mad weird dude!)

finally decided to get off my ass and do the water temple so i could finish this game, and it was really good! i think the child dungeons aren't very fun at all but everything after the later dungeons (especially starting with the water temple) are incredibly good. the n64 zeldas also hands down have my favorite character designs in the series and some of my favorite 'fantasy' designs in general, second only to akira toriyama's early work on dragon quest. the finale is also very good, i think wind waker's is "cooler" in terms of the ganon fight finales but i love everything about ganon's castle. him playing the organ waiting for you to arrive and that final confrontation are so good, i'd argue that the organ and the bloody head stab propel it a bit higher over how awesome wind waker's ending is (even if that one also had a really cool head stab). the game is definitely overrated, a lot of the issues people have with it ring incredibly true still and it can't really be avoided that it was immediately outdone completely by its sequel on the same console, but it's a super solid game overall.