#CLIVEHIVE

for starters, i don't have a ps5 so i watched my wonderful friend stream this game in full. i also have a preference for story-based games, so most of my reviews focus on this already, but since i can only go by what i saw, this is my rating.

i have so many problems with this game. i generally like so many characters in this game. this game has no idea what it wants to be about and proves that square enix is really struggling to capture the intimacy of human relationships—until they feel like it and throw it all in at the very end of a game that takes tens of hours to finish.

this game gives up on so many of its characters that it makes you feel like you were silly for expecting something with more detail. joshua is a ghost haunting clive until he's alive again and is a hooded-guy haunting clive until he joins clive and becomes almost irrelevant. then he dies again! and don't even bring up jote or dion or terence, characters who are so underwritten that they're simply placeholders. barnabas is a non-character until his fight which fucks and also he has a sentient horse man his side who can carry super buff men as if they're sheets of paper. i sure wish i knew any more about them at all. benedickta is the object of constant sexualization, talks about her past of being sexualized and abused, and then dies so. not great. hugo is obsessed with her and that's most of his writing after her death.

jill and gav really tied as my favorite characters and even among them there are issues. square enix typical misogyny runs rampant in jill's presentation but she still has moments of real beauty as a character, even though it's hard to feel like we really know her when she and clive can only rarely speak to each other. gav has a fun presentation, but i don't get why his backstory comes right before the final fight. doesn't make sense.

clive is an interesting case. he's the main character and everything revolves around him but he also is almost always fully reactive. many of the times he might need to make a choice, something happens to decide for him or he lets someone else's feelings/sentiments guide him. there's nothing wrong with that and it would honestly track for the story if clive is relying on others because he feels unprepared for the responsibility he's accepted as cid, but. the story never says that. it never lays any foundation for complex emotions about his current situation outside of his reactions to it, and only his past and loss get any kind of contemplative cutscenes. which, again, would be fine if the game wasn't trying to say his bonds with others are why he wins in the end. it feels unfocused. where are the conversations after every mission one on one with his allies? how does clive feel about his brother being alive but never revealing himself? why the hell does the game care so much about clive's dad in the last third of the game????

the structural issues of the story definitely don't harm the gameplay itself. this game is gorgeous and the combat is beautiful. i especially love the garuda, odin, and shiva movesets, and every effect that comes with the phoenix. the boss battles in this game go CRAZY HARD, i have no clue how these artists made that possible but sooo many props because it's terribly impressive.

music, A+ of course. soken is immensely talented. once i get to listen to the whole soundtrack on its own i'll update with my favorite tracks iirc.

in the end, i think if you have fun with the game then good. if you love final fantasy, i bet this will be really enjoyable. i'm newer to the franchise so i don't have a long history with it, so i'm not sure if that would have impacted my views. i don't hate this game at all, i just think that square enix often gets away with mediocre writing because that's just their reputation, so i wanted to say my piece. i had so much fun watching this game and hanging out with my friends, i'm so glad i could experience it with them! i'm so sleepy so i'm cutting off my review here TuT

square is not seeing heaven but jill is.

Wow. I have a lot of thoughts about this game, but I can say for sure that I understand if people don't like all the replaying. The characters live in a world without a future, everything you choose to do or not to do may be "meaningless," just like Kainé says in Ending E. All the replaying and side quests without any real reward or notable outcome remind you that this is a Game. Not just a world where the story is being told, but a game you are playing. In a weird meta way, it makes the story feel that much more meaningful. Immersive in a way that a lot of games can't and choose not to be because they want you to Be your character. Replicant forces you to keep killing because the protagonist wants to, needs to, and you don't have a say if you want to continue playing the game. It's magical.

Lots of games nowadays have meta elements, with recent ones possibly taking inspiration from the original version of this game, I'm sure, so I'd never say this is the only game that fucks with you the way Replicant does. I can say for me, though, that the pre-destined, fairytale-gone-wrong nature of Replicant took everything meta about this game to a new level for me and I don't know that anything will top it, as far as games of this style go.

There is no right answer in Replicant to questions like, "Who deserves to live?" Everyone loves someone else, whether they like it or not, and every person, living and dead, has cherished someone or something. That's the beauty of Replicant's twisting and turning story; Even if you begin to grasp the truths of its world in the beginning, its world will continue to turn and the story will continue to be told. Each character is their own person, you are you, and everyone gets to decide what their life means to them — They can do whatever they want with it. <3

i'm not going to bullshit you. going in without any prior knowledge and without any extreme biases, the second half of umineko will constantly throw you. maybe not in the ways you might think, but at the heart. maybe you won't like every twist or vaguery, maybe you'll love how the story unfolds in all its strangeness and magic. i couldn't tell you what you'll think, especially not after everything that happens in the questions arc, because the foundations of a journey like the one this game takes you on are only the beginning, yet remain as important as every minute of its latter half. and if you don't like it at all, that's your right as the reader right? you get to choose--and isn't that the point?

my reading of umineko when they cry spanned over the past nine months of my life to today. i spent approximately 142 hours reading and countless others listening to the soundtrack, looking over notes i took during my time playing, and pestering the friend who recommended it to me with ideas and theories. if there was a thing you could be wrong about, i probably was, and if there was a way to get as close to the answer without getting it, i did that too. and that was what made the experience so magical -- because finding the answer by myself wasn't as important as trying and immersing myself in a world that was created so lovingly that it started to feel like i wasn't reading a visual novel as much as i was reading a diary. stories about grief and loss and pain are never easy to read, but i don't think i've read many other stories as thoughtfully told as this one.

this is not a true story or one that is meant to be taken at its face in any way, which everyone else who's read clearly already knows. i don't think that i can really summarize my feelings about the entire game in a concise way, especially since i only finished recently, so it's likely i'll add onto this review in the future. i really think, though, that this game will probably change the way i read forever and, if i'm lucky, it'll impact the way i write, too.

edit: sooooo. recently learned the creator of this game is a massive zionist. apparently he created this game to mimic the genocide of palestinians and further push the narrative of there being a conflict between "Israel" and Palestine. I wanted to add this to the beginning of my older review because it's important that people get to know this kind of information.

This is a good game. It asks a lot of its players and offers an even more brutal version of the world than Part I. There's a lot of parts of the story that I think are missing something, but it's hard to put my finger on exactly what that is. It's really hard to say I enjoyed this game because like. It's fucked up. But also I think there's a lot of great stuff in here that people would have to be really silly to ignore or put down.

Every main character is compelling and even side characters, my personal standouts being Nora and Jesse, and Yara as well though I'm not sure if she's considered a main or secondary character, have their stories shown to us without any kind of heavy-handed narration forcing the audience to feel for them. All of the characters feel like real people, even in their cruelty, and especially in their grief. I'm not sure I've ever played or watched another game that feels as much like a funeral as this one, and it's a good thing. The audience is mourning Joel along with Ellie and also seeing Abby atone for more than just his murder. We see both protagonists lose themselves in vengeance in reverse parallel which mirrors the first game wonderfully.

One problem I have: This mirror of the first game sometimes feels forced. Abby cannot be Joel and she shouldn't have to be for us to sympathize with her. I think this was really my biggest problem with her writing because I really desperately wanted her to get to be her own character rather than having such direct and blatant ties to Joel as a character. For the record, I really like Abby actually and I think that if so much of her world with the WLF wasn't made to mirror Joel and Ellie's lives then her story would feel less like it was being forced to fit into another character's mold.

Her relationship with Lev is one of the best parts of the game and Ellie's relationship with Dina is one of them, too. Again, they parallel each other in the reverse, with Lev and Abby becoming close like family and Ellie and Dina's straining under the weight of bitter grief and the pain that comes with it, that poisons and aches. Ellie really shows how much she learned from Joel for better or for worse and Abby tries to reconnect with the things her father wanted her to value, that she forgot in favor of anger.

The story just makes sense. You can be frustrated by the character choices as much as you want, I know there were moments where I was thinking NO DOOOON'T, but that doesn't mean that the choices are out of character. Sometimes the wrong choice is the right one as far as what a person would truly do.

I'm feeling a bit stuck on how to score this game and I have a feeling that I'm going to switch back and forth on it over time, but I'd prefer to take what I enjoyed from it with me and leave my issues with the game here. I didn't like that the method of Joel's death felt a bit like it was put in the game for shock value, but at the same time I have no issue with his death being a part of the story. IT SUCKS but it doesn't happen to be shocking.

And it matters through to the end—in every reminder of his selfishness, in each and every time Ellie misses him, in how much Tommy becomes like him in his absence, in J.J.'s presence, and in every doodled moth. This story has always been Ellie's and her pain is our pain. I think that's really the point.