A limit that is pushed, but not broken.

There's no doubt that the game is visually breathtaking. Each ember that radiates from Phoenix's wings or Ifrit's hands are as palpable as the real deal. Particle effects through intimate clashes of steel and magic fill up the screen in dramatic and stimulating flare. Each unique environment within Valisthea gets pretty close to reality breaking, if not for the giant spiders and occasional Chocobo. Even in 2023, there aren't many games that I personally believe look so graphically intense on the PS5, but this game genuinely seems like it utilizes almost all the capabilities of the upgraded hardware. But that's pretty much it's only unique identity.

In fact, I'd say most of the game is devoid of one. That isn't ENTIRELY a bad thing; it wears its influences and ideas on its sleeve with pride. The issue is that rather than being a proper amalgamation of those influences, it comes off more like a Frankenstein of those ideas that seems a bit too excited to display those influences instead of presenting a completely exclusive and engaging experience. A key example here is the combat.

It's not without merit, the combat. Clive has the ability to do some interesting things with a meager standard combo that is only built upon as time goes on and you unlock more Eikon abilities, but the ceiling is still incredibly low. Initially I thought that the combat was bare-bones without the execution or player incentive to explore more, and while that notion wasn't entirely unproven by the end of the game, I still found myself trying to take all of the abilities to their brink, with some success. You'd be hard-pressed to discuss this game without discussing Devil May Cry; both share the same battle designer (Ryota Suzuki), after all. Elements both in practicality and style are all over the place (Helm Splitter, Enemy Step, Judgement Cut End), but it leans more towards that style and less towards that practicality.

That being said, it isn't trying to be DMC. The comparisons aren't unfounded, but it's an RPG and not an action adventure game with the purpose of being extensible in battle. When the situation arises for it, you can respec and adjust your abilities for the occasion. In that sense, it does well.

I think my biggest problem is enemy engagement. The standard grunt enemy feels to be placed as to activate a neuron and a mini-boss only to activate two. The bosses lack positional awareness and spam the limited pool of moves they have with abandon, ever so slightly increasing the frequency and potency as death draws near. I had only died twice during my entire playthrough and in both instances I wasn't engaged in combat at all because there is no proper threat of death in this game, even with the final boss. Nothing here is challenging, nothing here is rewarding. It does not help that gearing is practically useless, as crafting weapons and defenses come only with positives and no negatives, making every conflict a bore at the most. Not even the S-rank hunts could satiate this; an increased health pool and more damage is not enough variation to satisfy what I am looking for. But the same cannot be said for the Eikon fights, which are easily the best aspect about this game. Grandiose spectacle that is usually coupled with a phenomenal composition and direction which hasn't been matched in any recent JRPG release, withstanding FF7R. I don't have much to say because they are experiences to behold, and make up for any lack of enjoyment that takes place during the mostly mundane standard combat.

The cast is at best extraordinary and at worst indigent. Characters like Joshua, Dion, Gav, Cid, and Byron showcase the best of Kazutoyo Maehiro's work as we get to see not only how nuanced each of these characters are, but how formative they are to the total experience of this adventure. Each of these characters bounce of Clive extremely well while going through their own personal dilemmas and struggle or refine their ideology within their world. Characters like Hugo, Barnabus, and Ultima fall completely short for me in terms of resonance and cohesiveness, which I feel is the result of a lack of proper engagement with their perspectives and dogma.

The gameplay loop is also something that is excruciatingly boring. Glorious crusades are undercut by fetch quests, mob waves, mini-boss, which leads to the actual boss, then the Eikon fight, and then repeat. The first half of this loop is only exasperated by the extreme amounts of dialogue. In the beginning, I found all of it extremely impressive, as the voice work is done well and fits within the landscape of the game. But it is too extensive, and toward the final 5 hours of the game I found it imperative to skip over dialogue that did little to add anything to the story.

I mentioned the identity aspect at the beginning because it's a big talking point about this game. Other people seem to think it's a stark detraction and while I don't entirely disagree I think it's a bit more nuanced than people would like to admit. Re-imagined fanfares sound like crutches that hold Soken's production back but the insistence of seriousness makes it feel alien as there isn't ever a time to kick back and relax with your party. This is just an example, but the point I'm trying to make is that instead of being something that defines itself as a Final Fantasy game, it takes the philosophy of other works and attempts a fusion that isn't without hiccups. That in of itself can be discussed if that is what truly makes it a Final Fantasy game though.

I even consider the narrative to be half-baked; it presents so many interesting ideas with the hierarchical nature of its society and alludes to the parallels with our world with Dominants being weapons of mass destruction and the Mothercrystals/Blight being a look at our own society's uses of fossil fuels and the ensuing damage but doesn't take a proper stab at any of these things. All that being said... this game has some phenomenal moments that shine brighter than a lot of its flaws, and concludes with class.

It's so close to being amazing, but I can never say that I didn't enjoy myself.
3.5/5

(No spoilers)

I went into this game with fairly high expectations in certain aspects. Those being story, characters, gameplay, and spectacle. And while those are some of the most important parts of a good video game, it does fall short in things that I consider minor but others may not. This review focuses on a lot of the negatives, but I want to make it clear that they do not outweigh the positives and I now consider this one of my favorite games of all time.

My biggest problem is the pacing of the main story quests. This game reaches some of the highest highs I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing in a video game, but in the second half it frequently it pulls you back down with menial fetch quests that do nothing but keep you busy while the next spectacle is prepared. There is a precedent to this style of storytelling, giving you time to breathe before going all in on the next major event (for an example of expert story pacing, see the Resident Evil 4 remake), but it happens far too often and does nothing to properly engage the player. While they are relevant to the plot, they also lack any urgency or importance. These kinds of things should be relegated to side quests, not the main story.

Regarding side quests, they are by and large not very good. They do an okay job of building on the world around you, but there is just nothing particularly fun about going to a location and holding X to gather materials (especially egregious that some of these instances happen during the MAIN quest). I shouldn't be surprised since this is a developer known for their MMO work (a genre where side quests are mainly a means to get XP) but I can't help being a little disappointed.

As far as other side content goes, the developers explained there are no minigames or life skills like previous entries in the series as Clive's story is not a happy one and it wouldn't have made sense. I just don't agree, and it sucks that they aren't here. Outside of that, the bulk of side content lies in the hunts, arcade mode, and Chronolith trials. If you're fiending for combat, these are here for you. These are extremely good, and go along with my other biggest praise of the game.

The general combat and individual encounter design is some of the best I have ever played. There were many, many boss fights and hunts that I did in my 30+ hours (so far) and not once did I feel like an attack was poorly designed. It is absurdly fun weaving through telegraphs and interacting with so many cool Eikon abilities.

I have so much more experimenting I need to do, but it's clear from what I've used that every ability is strong in one aspect or another. The mastery system lets you mix things up pretty significantly and there is a lot more player choice here than I had initially thought. The combat itself also has a lot of hidden depth. My one tiny little complaint is toppling enemies with Garuda is so damn good I feel like I'm leaving damage on the table if I'm not using it, which brings me down to only two Eikon slots. Regardless, there are a staggering number of ways to initiate and hold a combo, whether using Eikonic feats or even commanding Torgal. Sure, you CAN beat the game by button mashing--which keeps the barrier to entry low--but there's no way I'm going to do that.

As a side note the itemization in this game is weak, and the crafting system is basic. But this has never been a strength of the series, so I'm okay with a couple stat sticks and damage/cooldown passives.

Rounding off this review with a final look at the positives, I found the story incredible when things were actually happening. It hit every emotional beat and by the end of it I was fully invested and felt the full force of its impact. The sentiment from other reviews is that it goes fairly off the rails in the final act, but personally I feel like it does so in a way that isn't alien to the JRPG genre. Not to dismiss any flaws, but there wasn't anything I was blindsided by and it never really breaks the mold on this type of story. It does fail to address a few things by the end, but not in a way that hindered my experience. The main villain is good but doesn't reach the same heights the best in the franchise do.

The Eikon battles are the peak of the game. When I mentioned highest highs, this is what I was referring to. I went in hoping they weren't just button mashing and QTEs, and it blew my expectations away. These are incredible, immersive battles between titans where scale and spectacle just kept getting bigger. I found myself finishing these and wondering how the next one could possibly be better--but it was every time. These encounters always happened at major story points, and the accompanying cutscenes never disappointed, with smooth transitions between cinematics and gameplay paired with, overall, some of the best English voice acting in video games. I never felt like the line delivery was flat or out of place.

The characters are amazing. There are some real gems in this cast, Clive, Dion, Cid, Byron, and one unnamed character in particular shone the brightest for me. Barnabas is propped up as one of the most powerful characters in the game, and he delivers on that with every moment he takes the screen. Jill unfortunately does not reach the heights that other major female characters in the series do, but I loved her relationship with Clive and she does have her moments. The side characters found in your main hub also fell short for me. They just weren't very interesting.

Creative Business Unit III, known best for their work on Final Fantasy XIV for the last decade, transfers a lot of their storytelling and game design experience to XVI, for better or worse. It's not perfect, but still holds a high score for me.

Thanks for reading if you did.

"An epic story based on the theme of love..."

On startup, there's just a black screen, and music. Some names appear, a fade to black. A black and white render of a character or place from the game, a fade to black. The play experience of Final Fantasy VIII is defined by punctuation. When I told a friend of mine I was playing the game, he assumed I meant the remaster; when I clarified that I was playing the original PlayStation version, he replied "How are those load times?" It's consistently shocking to me how people assume that the load times in these old disc based games were just universally bad, when it usually has more to do with how the program itself is designed than the limitations of the hardware. In any case, the fading in and out between each screen transition is an important part of the game's feel. Each seam is an opportunity for a shift in scale, a shift in mood, a new song to set the stage, a new perspective when the visuals do present themselves.

At the beginning of the game, the player is able to name the main character, Squall, whatever they like. Afterwards as Squall talks with Dr. Kadowaki, she ponders the name of Squall's instructor, there's a heavy pause. It's as if the game is about to bring up a second menu, where the player will name this character as well, but it doesn't happen. Kadowaki says the character's name outright, Quistis.

The first choice you're really given in the game, aside from your character's name, is whether or not you want to use your desk terminal in the classroom. It contains quite a bit of background on the world, including things I would have otherwise considered "twists", and even things I didn't really absorb in my first several playthroughs. It has the student guidelines for the Garden, information on what SeeDs are, and a somber announcement that the school festival is almost certainly not going to happen. Throughout my life I played through this opening section of the game at least half a dozen times without looking at this terminal at all, and I imagine I'm not the only one who ignored it. On Disc 3, probably more than 20 hours into the game for most players, someone says "Of course monsters live on the moon, didn't you learn that in school?"

There's an idea I've had for a game for a long while, a setting inspired by Fullmetal Alchemist, gameplay inspired by what I imagined Shin Megami Tensei would be like when it was first described to me, an RPG with absurd customizability where the only way to win was to indulge in a high risk-high reward gamble inspired by Battle Network's dark chips. A world where magic exists, but almost nobody is any good at it, a game where even the best party setups would be cyclically robbing Peter to pay Paul. If I had been a better student, if I had actually read the terminal at my desk, if I had actually learned how to play the game a few playthroughs earlier, I could have realized that Final Fantasy VIII is the closest any game I'm familiar with has come to being my dream JRPG.

Final Fantasy VIII isn't a game where you grind enemies for experience points, and it definitely isn't a game where you repeatedly draw the same spell from the same enemy until you can't anymore. Final Fantasy VIII is a game where you play card games and answer quizzes and spec into certain skills so that you can buy a stock of easily obtainable items and turn them into high level magic and quadruple every party member's HP by the end of Disc 1 without leveling up at all. The worst part of every JRPG is the grind, the amount of time it takes to improve your characters, the amount of time you spend waiting for your turn. The interesting part of a JRPG is rarely the fight, it's the preparation, and Final Fantasy VIII knows this. It's a JRPG that asks you to work smarter, not harder. It's a game where turning every boss fight into a coin toss that ends on the first turn is a strategy that is not only possible, it's completely valid.

Final Fantasy VIII is cinematic in a way that few games have been able to be. By the time I first played the game, nearly a decade after its original release, its graphics were still not so deprecated to be distracting. My first experience with game environments made predominantly of prerendered background was Universal Theme Parks Adventure on the Gamecube, and the Wii wasn't much more visually impressive than that, so to me this likely didn't feel as antiquated as someone more accustomed to the 7th generation consoles or high end PC's from the time might have thought. Sometimes there are transitions between scenes with 3D characters on a static background, to 3D characters over an animated prerendered scene complete with shifting perspective, to a prerendered cutscene.

While these moments are impressive, they are also some of the moments where the issue with the remaster become most glaring. The versions of Final Fantasy VIII available on modern platforms are apparently based on the original PC version of the game, which has no support for analog control, nor rumble. Using a D-pad was a bit more acceptable in Final Fantasy VII, with its city blocks and industrial catwalks; however, in Final Fantasy VIII even the manmade locations have a swooping curved Y2K futurist aesthetic that makes navigating them at straight angles just plain cumbersome, and it's even worse when the camera is given an opportunity to move around. The lack of rumble in these modern versions makes it more difficult for the player to discern whether they have successfully timed their Paper Mario-esque gunblade critical hits when doing basic combat. I'd recommend either playing the game from the original discs (which aren't particularly expensive because apparently Square Enix still prints new ones from time to time), or perhaps there's a mod for the PC version that can fix these issues.

Balamb Garden is initially presented with this light, airy music, like the music Haruomi Hosono apparently made for convenience stores in the 80's. Beneath the uniforms and the combat exercises, Garden is home. A bit later in the game the team visits another Garden in Galbadia; defamiliarized, the same elements of Garden are now characterized as sterile, as cold as a waiting room, its fascistic character laid bare. The apparent death of Seifer lets the banal reality of the world set in. When the player is finally able to return to Balamb Garden hours later, they find it has erupted into chaos, students splintering into separate factions and killing each other over a conflict that many of them barely understand. Balamb Garden becomes this games equivalent of the boat in other Final Fantasy games, Trabia Garden is destroyed, and the party collectively remembers the orphanage on a coast in the middle of nowhere, the place where they all grew up together. Homes destroyed, homes we take with us, homes we leave behind, homes that aren't ours, that aren't safe anymore. Balamb Garden too is eventually left behind, most players likely leaving it docked at Fisherman's Horizon from Disc 3 onward.

Where do I even start with Squall and Rinoa.

Aside from Squall and Rinoa, most of the party members take a backseat for a good portion of the game. Aside from Squall, Rinoa is the only character in the game that the player is able to name. You name her because she isn't just another party member, she's the other player character. Her goal of Timber's independence is what actually gets the plot of the game moving, while Squall merely settles into his role as acting leader of Balamb's SeeD. She has agency, and the worst thing that can happen, the lowest point of the story's arc, is for her to lose that, to be forcibly closed off from the rest of the world by a force beyond control or comprehension. And here, Squall realizes that this is exactly what he has done to himself. This is why the other party members don't have this sort of role in the story, why they can't be named, because they don't have this connection to Squall, to the player, they know not to try.

When I play RPG's old and new alike, I often think about a moment in Chris Davis' review of the original Fallout wherein he says that the dialogue in a game like that couldn't work in a modern game, it couldn't be fully voice acted, it couldn't be delivered with a straight face, it couldn't be taken seriously. Consider the moment in the game where Edea, free from Ultimecia's control, explains the villain's plan. To progress, the player has to talk to Edea several times, and attempt to leave the room. The screen goes black, Squall's thoughts appear in transparent text boxes in the center of the screen while solid text boxes pop up around them. He catches bits and pieces of the science fantasy technobabble but all he can really think about is Rinoa. If they had tried to communicate this with facial expressions, motion capture gesticulating, voice over, I genuinely think that the game would have suffered for it. The way that the user interface elements typical of a JRPG are used here communicates the emotion in such a tangible, potent way, just trying to semi-realistically animate Squall with a pensive face wouldn't be able to capture it.

There's quite a bit of Oedipal stuff here, isn't there? The concept of the sorceress as a sort of interdimensional primal mother, Squall's apparent estranged father cloistered away, leader of an invisible isolationist nation, not to mention Cid's role as adoptive father. The whole world have contorted into some kind of grand familial conspiracy to keep the mother and father a secret. There's an a sort of half-implied pseudo-incest, the ambiguity of which characters are whose children; Rinoa is most likely simply the daughter of Squall's father's first true love, but for much of the game there's a nagging question.

In Disc 3, we drop everything and leave our post, leave the planet itself, in the pursuit of restoring Rinoa's will. Squall calls out to her, she can't hear, and under control of the sorceress she is thrown into the vacuum of space, utterly alone. Ellone brings Squall into her memories, into her mind, eventually into the closest past to the future, the present. He joins her in the endless void, and they stow away together on a derelict spaceship. Once outside of their spacesuits, Rinoa asks for a hug; despite the risk he took to save her life, despite perhaps knowing her thoughts more intimately now than any other person, he refuses. The encounter with the xenomorph-like aliens on this ship is so distracting and so on-the-nose that I feel like it can't possibly be anything other than intentional. That surely this is representative of how even now Rinoa is still terrifying to Squall, the alien, the other. How do you share your self with someone?

The first time I played this game, I was aware that there would be a needle drop of a pop song complete with vocals, but I didn't know when or what the context would be. I was kind of taken aback, confused as to why it played here. As Rinoa completely opens up and tells Squall that he provides her the kind of comfort she previously only associated with family, he ignores her, the heightened emotions of his heroism deflate as the two literally descend back down to earth. This song, "Eyes On Me", in the context of the game is written by Rinoa's mother, about Squall's father. This song doesn't play here because it's the grand happy ending, it plays here because it's the climax of Squall's inner conflict. Are you really going to make the same mistake your father did? Are you really going to refuse to open up? Are you really going to keep lying to yourself, to everyone else, and keep that stupid stoic look on your face and pretend you don't care because it's "cool"?

I just hate hearing people talk about this game. Nobody gets it. It's as if Squall is just some whiny brat who won't get in the robot, or he's an incel and Rinoa is his manic pixie dream girl. Or the whole game is just reddit fedora child soldier badass mall-ninja military aesthetic. With all the dumbass Channel Awesome-tier takes I see people spouting about this game I could hardly believe any of the people saying that shit have even played it, or at least not beyond the first few hours, if it weren't for the fact that it took me like 4 playthroughs to really get it myself. I can hardly believe how few views on youtube some of the songs from this game have, how it's actually kind of hard to find recordings of the version of Eyes On Me that can play during the Garden Festival in Fisherman's Horizon, that one of the few recordings I can find has only a few hundred views and is interrupted multiple times by screenshot sound effects.

How could you think so low of the game when the song at the core of it all, the song whose phrases echo through at least half a dozen of the game's background tracks, is contextualized as the other half of the player crying out "Don't you know I'm a person? Don't you know I'm just like you? That I have my own thoughts and dreams and desires?" I genuinely believe Final Fantasy VIII is one of, if not simply the best written narrative ever told in a video game, and one of the best coming of age stories of the past few decades. I don't understand how someone who has actually experienced it in full could walk away from it and so totally ignore the obvious character development that occurs, that Squall is more than the brick wall we see in the games opening chapters, that Rinoa is more than just a wish fulfillment "romance option".

Still, Squall's indecision means that their ship touches down, Rinoa turns herself in to the Esthar soldiers to be sealed away in the sorceress memorial for the safety of the world. At virtually the last possible moment, Squall chooses honesty. It is at this moment that the player gets this game's airship, the spaceship Ragnarok. The music that plays during flight, the freedom it offers, the uniquely satisfying way that it handles compared to all other movement in the game, this is the ultimate mechanical and emotional payoff.

I said in a previous review of this game on this site that this is the only video game I own which features its narrative theme as a bullet point on the back of the box, and that says it all, doesn't it? Final Fantasy VII touts its size, its audiovisual spectacle, but it gets no more specific than a vague gesture towards "a good story". Final Fantasy IX, as good as it is, is Square admitting defeat; in its appeal to nostalgia it reveals an internal sense that this format is already as archaic as the SNES games which came before. Final Fantasy X was the real future, with its voice acting, facial expressions, and full 3D environments rendered in real time. Final Fantasy X was the point where these games just utterly lost something, they stopped feeling like Final Fantasy. From the first to the ninth each game in this series truly felt like a world, as though even with its tricky sense of scale and perspective the player could truly feel as though they had explored every nook and cranny of a massive place. Final Fantasy VII was sort of properly primitive, abstract through necessity, struggling to convey itself through multiple discontinuous styles. Final Fantasy VIII was perhaps the absolute pinnacle of a kind of game that we simply don't see anymore and may never again, and it was all in the name of love.

Anyway, this is where I reveal that I'm actually a fake fan, I've never beaten this game. I've gotten to the final disc at least 4 times, I have never beaten the final boss, I have never seen the credits. The entire first three discs of this game are actually just the tutorial, they're baby mode, once you have literally the slightest idea of how to build a decent party the entire game up until the final dungeon is a complete cakewalk. Then, the final dungeon, the entire 4th Disc, is a Resident Evil mansion full of super-bosses, each of which basically requires you to completely reconfigure your party to meet some hyper-specific criteria. I haven't touched my current save file in months, maybe I'll beat it next playthrough, maybe the payoff will feel so great that I'll add that last half star to my rating, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Ok so starting off I would like to go over the positives I have for this game. I love the exploration and sense of scale like with stormveil castle, sometimes it truly does feel like a cinematic on the grandness of it all, the addition of the horse, the art direction and atmosphere is stellar, Finding your way around the world/areas is super satisfying. I can definitely see the effort that was put into them and they are worthy of my praise.... When it isn't recycled.

I feel I am still encountering some of the flaws I find in other entries that I did with say, DS3. The enemy design/boss fights in this game are kind of a joke, one of my favorite things I recently realized about fromsoft titles that I feel is lacking in newer entries is the uniqueness/gimmicks, combat I'll admit in souls was never really that great, bosses being mostly boilled down to roll at a set of some patterns, hit a heavy (in this case jump) attack, maybe hope to stagger them, and run away, then rinse and repeat. and to be honest, that's fine, if the bosses are interesting in return. One of the things I LOVE about DS1 and even Demon Souls is how unique it was
approaching some of the boss fights. Lets take the four kings for example, The four kings have a really interesting scenario you are put in because of them, you have to equip a ring to drop down into a completely endless black abyss even to get a chance to fight them, and once you do the pressure is on you immediately, you have to kill them as quickly as possible or you'll get swarmed, while having no idea where one could pop up and attack due to their being zero depth perception in the pitch black room, because of this and the music you could feel dread/fear as well, this is what made the fight so memorable! I miss this design dearly. I can mention even more like the tower knight or the father of the abyss Manus, in a way this gimmick/wacky design made each boss stand out in their own way, it was how bosses could still be hard as hell but very interesting, now here the bosses are pretty boring and forgettable for the most part, its just the next Artorias/nameless king fighting style with none of the charm or gimmicks even they had. A shame really. Like for example Margit is, in my opinion one of the poorest designed bosses I've seen in a game. It felt like I was fighting a sekiro boss inside a game with DS3 movement and combat. He was more of a boss for a different game imo. He is how I would picture an obnoxious boss than a actual hard one, and that doesn't even scratch the surface with bosses like the Elden Beast, Godrick, Godskin Duo, and more.

I almost think the bosses were like a second thought, and the open-world was really the priority here

The tight interconnected world is something I will forever miss from early Souls games, through clever bonfire placements, shortcuts that had sooo many tricks and traps to them, and without much handholding it felt so much more engaging that way from an RPG title, some say it was too cryptic for their liking but hey whatever. But that isn't the glaring issue for me with Souls games now,

To top it all off with the exploration, once I reached the snow area, I saw very little reason to even go to the unexplored dungeons anymore, saw one dungeon before hand? Oh well lets copy and paste it and the bosses, if you saw one dungeon then you pretty much seen almost all of them in this game.

I want to talk about how absolute trash the damage scaling is in this game, espiecally when you approach endgame it starts to get obnixous instead of hard, hell even the common enemies like BIRDS can 2-3 tap you so easily, wtf?
To me, this games difficulty is not really "difficult" I see it as just artifical difficulty, an illusion of difficulty depth.

I'll give props to them fixing the weapon arts from DS3 this time, making them much more cool to use and interesting mechanically. The summons like the mimics are pretty cool additions that can change your playstyle but this doesn't fix the boss design and recycled content throughout the game, so many of the bosses like tree sentinel, or the dungeons having the same exact fights or design philosphies in the levels, its pretty ridiculous

There has to be balance, Sekiro did this perfectly and so did DS1 I don't know why they chose this approach here. Yes, Sekiro does indeed do the pattern stuff, but the thing is the game makes up for is its combat mechanics/parry system against the boss fights, the movement and ways you can use your jump, even the ability to jump off enemies with the combined prosthetic tools at your disposal really enhances it imo. It all meshes perfectly there.

I found more depth and interest fighting the optional bosses than the main ones honestly, I'm not sure how I feel about that, I think out of all the bosses I can name Renella, Radahan, Godfrey, and Makileth where ones I actually liked quite alot. The rest are pretty medicore, even boring I'd say which is unfortuante.

So, I like this game quite a bit but I still find the bosses lacking compared to earlier entries like Sekiro, Demon Souls, and DS1, not to shit on anybody who loves this game, I can see why but I guess some of this stuff just isn't for me. So I give it a 3.5/5, not sure if I'll even come back for the dlcs if they even happen.

Quantity does not replace Quality, Fromsoft. Best remember that.

(Lowered it to 3 .)

It doesn't surprise me to hear that this game had a mixed reception when it first came out in Japan in 2015, because I most certainly did not vibe with it as much as a lot of people did and do. The 6 years of waiting undoubtedly did not help.

I'll start off by saying that the presentation is excellent. The series' transition to 3D was incredible, but this game truly takes it to the next level. The animations are better than ever, and the Dance of Deduction sequences are beautiful to look at. The game’s cast is also fantastic, and I’d go as far as to say this is probably the best AA ensemble we’ve had yet. The music’s also incredible, but it’s Ace Attorney, so what else is new?

Due to some genuinely interesting design decisions that were made, all of the cases in this game, imo, suffer from severe pacing issues, in addition to some of the mysteries just not being all that interesting. The first and second cases are decent but go on for far too long, the third case is solid but doesn’t reach the heights of some of the other cases in the franchise, the fourth case is an absolute bore and the fifth case is interesting, but not interesting enough for it to go on as long as it did. Again, none of them are outright bad (There aren’t any Turnabout Big Tops or Turnabout Serenades here), their pacing is just really, really off.

I’m not going to jump into GAA2 immediately (the thought of playing two Ace Attorney games back to back sounds exhausting), but I’ve heard it pretty much fixes all the issues in this one and is one of the best games in the franchise, so I’m looking forward to it.