This one's a tricky one, because the game has so much charm that it almost outweighs its negatives. The characters are absolutely wonderful, the art is amazing, the music is gorgeous, the game has some fun puzzles and great world design. However, the overarching story is lacking. It has a great setup, which is then marred by poor pacing, some nonsensical story beats, and a lack of any sort of conclusion for the majority of the story's setups. Additionally, while the moment to moment gameplay is fairly enjoyable, it does feel unfair when facing groups of enemies. However, despite these flaws, the game was still quite good, and I'm hopeful for what this team tackles next.

The finale to the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy continues the trend of high quality, yet extremely experimental Final Fantasies. This one was particularly dense and I wasn't sure at first if I'd end up enjoyed it, but I'd say it ranks near the first of the trilogy for me on completion. The progression is unique, relying entirely on completing quests for stat boosts, the battle system is dynamic and involved, garbs are a cool way to handle classes & movesets, and the world is actually somewhat intriguing despite its fairly nonsensical nature. Overall, loved this trilogy, and love to see it when Square Enix really experiments.

In the running for one of the worst games I've ever played. A port of a PSP game and somehow has frame drops and skips on Switch. The graphics aren't good enough to warrant these drops, truly astounding. The gameplay is absolutely terrible. The controls make it difficult to pull off whatever moves you're trying to do, the camera is impossible to wrangle, fighting multiple enemies is an exercise in frustration. The cherry on top was that the game crashed as soon as I beat the final boss. Horrible horrible game.

I went into this one with pretty low expectations. It's definitely widely considered to be the black sheep of the series. At first, those low expectations were confirmed, with a firehose of nonsense jargon requiring constant Datalog lookups, straight line maps, and barebones gameplay. However, by the end of the game I was in love with its systems and its world. It turns out to be an incredibly tactical system, with a lot reliant on pre-battle setup and actually planning out a strategy, mixed with quick, on-the-fly thinking when things go wrong. The world paints a fascinating picture of humanity at the whims of malevolent gods, and while the story itself is confusing from time to time, it still came together. All in all, this one surprised me and I'm excited for the rest of the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy.

I really wanted to like this game because everything about it is stylish and slick, but it unfortunately did not land for me at all. I didn't find the characters interesting, and it often felt like the writers were trying much too hard with the different characters' mannerisms. The overarching story was low stakes and felt more like a bunch of vignettes, which weren't particularly interesting individually or altogether. The story segments were bridged with this first person exploration, but it was horrendous to control it with a touch screen, and the game performed like total ass. It was outright unplayable on my iPhone X and I wasn't even able to finish the game until I got an iPhone 12. Avoid.