When a friend first asked me how I would describe Final Fantasy II, I was about half way through the game, and had just met Leila. I didn’t really know how to describe it, it was something I couldn’t compare to anything I’d played before. It led me through the story like an early JRPG but with early WRPG mechanics. It was bizarre and completely threw me off from what I learned in FFI. So much of what I learned from the first game didn’t matter at all now, and what it was trying to teach me seemed almost alien. So of course, my natural response to my friend was a wary, “Have you ever played… Morrowind?”

Final Fantasy II is nothing like Morrowind. Well, it has its similarities, as comparing any game from the same genre to each other would, I guess. I came into Final Fantasy II having only the original Final Fantasy to compare it to… eh, within the Final Fantasy series at least, as I have played a handful of 3rd-gen RPGs before it. Maybe it’s why I ended up thinking of FFII so positively compared to others. Maybe that’s a negative, but I like to think of it as a positive. It keeps me thinking of FFII in the bubble it originally released to, but unfortunately that also lacks me being able to compare it to much else.

One thing I should warn before diving fully into the review is that I did play the game in Japanese, so some of the names for things might be spelled differently from my own personal transliteration vs other later official English translations (wait his name was Josef and not Joseph this whole time?!). The Famicom version I believe is also missing quite a few additions that future versions had added later on, including ones added even a couple years later in the Famicom dual-release of both FFI + FFII.

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From first glance, I could immediately tell that Final Fantasy II had improved drastically from its predecessor. The creators were able to expand A LOT on what they made with the original. Just to list a few:

• You’re now able to fully go into buildings and walk around. You can even see little Firion sleeping in the inn!
• There's a crazy amount of new magic you can learn (which you see early on thanks to Ming Wu).
• You can now see your character’s negative status effects play as a funny symbol on top of them in battle (black glasses for blind, green swirls for poison, they literally turn into a rock when hit with the stone status!). It looks great and makes it easier for players to remember what exactly the current status of their party is just at a glance.
• The character designs are more varied and more detailed, even if Firion is just the fighter sprite from the first game. With Maria, we can now see our first true playable female character in the series, rather than the assumed fully-male cast of the first (or at least that’s how the English guidebook describes the cast which uh, infamously got quite a few things wrong about the game, so take that as you will LOL). You meet a very colorful cast of characters right at the start as well, with a good amount having fairly unique designs (Ming Wu is my favorite)!
• Lastly, the thing I noticed and was so happy to see was that you can now save whenever you want. Well, whenever you’re on the overworld map. But, still! It’s a button that’s always on your menu screen. You don’t have to bank on having a hotel or cottage in your pocket so you can save before a dungeon, which can make expeditions infinitely less frustrating.

The story of FFII is surprisingly engaging for a 3rd-gen game, with it starting out with a 5 minute long interactive cutscene kinda thing. Watching it, you quickly learn that you now have a set story with characters that have a set destiny. You can name them and train them to be whatever you want, but no matter what, the story has a path it will always take with characters you can’t always predict. Oh boy, how you can not predict. About 2/3rds of the temporary party members who join you end up dying! Even NPCs you don’t interact with too often end up dying! But hey, the story does focus around war, and what’s war without loss. Though more realistically, I imagine they killed off a majority of your short-term party members as a way to cycle through different characters and show the player different builds they themselves could evolve on. My favorite non-player characters that I met along the way were Paul the Ninja, and Sid and his son, who offer a shuttle with their flying boat not unlike the one from the first game… hey wait, why does Sid have his clearly underaged son in a bar? Oh well, it works for the story. Just try not to think about it!

There’s little things I can nitpick though, of course. I absolutely hate the new map. I understand this map is WAY bigger than the last, and the illusion of the globe allows them to fit more with less, but holy shit its soooo slow - and if I just want to check what direction I want to go to reach a dungeon, I have to slowlyyyyyyy wait for the globe to turnnn and inchhhh and oooo we’re almost there, baby!!!! Well, this shouldn’t be a problem, right? Final Fantasy I, Dragon Quest, Legend of Zelda are all games that provide a full map for you in the manual to glance at, so there must be one in this manual- nope. Okay, what about the guidebook? You know, the thing you spend extra money on to hold your hand and show you how to get through the whole game- nope. There’s no maps at all actually, even for the dungeons! Remember how Final Fantasy I had big maps for the player to scan through for everything, all within the manual packaged with the game? Well, Final Fantasy II says “Fuck you, why don’t you figure out,” as they hand you Slowpoke Rodriguez’s favorite class globe.

The manual and guidebook at least are very useful in including every little detail about the new leveling system, and also informing the player on what all the new magic does. A stupid complaint, but skimming through this lovely mapless guidebook, I was excited to see Chocobos appear, which are like giant chickens your player can ride on! Unfortunately, I never ran into them once throughout the entire game. They seemed cute, and the book says you can find them in a specific forest if you wander, but I never found one, even when purposefully looking for them. Oh well, maybe I was just unlucky!

Wait, that’s it? Those are the only complaints? It seems like FFII should smell like roses in comparison to FFI after all that, shouldn’t it? Well, it does…! It does, except for one very small, very tiny detail…

GAMEPLAY AND RPG MECHANICS

FFII doesn’t level in the way that Dragon Quest or even the original Final Fantasy do. In fact, the closest comparison I can personally make to a game that I’ve played that came out before FFII is regular tabletop DND. When you want to level up, you have to focus on a specific skill or trait. It’s not as simple as leveling up your magic to improve your magic; you have to focus on what exactly you want to level up in your magic. Did you want your magic attack to be stronger? Then focus on using the specific spell you want to be stronger, as the more you use it the more it levels up. Did you need more MP? Then use more magic to get more magic! Using magic in general also helps level up your magic strength… but specifically your intelligence or spirit which correlate to your black and white magic respectively. See where I got the Morrowind comparison? It’s a lot, but as you can see with my magic example, a lot of it relies on each other, so if you play naturally, you should still level up naturally like you would in FF1.

That would be all fine and dandy, except you don’t level up the way the creators intended. I don’t know whose idea it was to go against the golden rule for JRPGs since Dragon Quest: Allow players to level up quickly with the game requiring more points to level up the further they play. For example, to get to level 2 in… let’s say using a sword, maybe you need to use it 10 times before it reaches level 2. After that, then you need to use it 20 times to reach level 3, and so far so forth. FFII doesn’t do that, and I think that’s where its biggest flaw shows. It requires you to use whatever it is you want 100 times each time you want to level it up, all from the start. It’s awful, to put it lightly. The great thing to remember is all the Final Fantasys on the Famicom are insanely broken! As a result, I quickly found out that you can input a move on a party member and quickly cancel it and do it again. It only takes one move but it still counts the first use, essentially doubling the points I get from it. Do this 50 times, and you just leveled yourself up in one battle. Though of course, it’s just that one thing you leveled up, whether that be a magic skill, your attack, defense, HP, MP, or whatever else you focused on. It unfortunately also can mess with the leveling a crazy amount as well. Ugh, just think! This would be significantly less of a problem if they just followed the guide of leveling-up starting fast only to slow it down the further you go. They did it in FFI, so they must have found an issue to force the mandatory 100 points for FFII… On top of that all, the same issues with magic in FFI still exist in FFII, with a nice chunk of spells being completely broken and not working the way they intended. Most infamously it affects Ultima, a spell intended to be the most powerful in the entire game. The only way to figure out what works and what doesn’t is through trial and error- how horrendous! Thankfully, we live in the future, so I was able to quickly find a guide online that lets modern players know what magic to not waste their time on.

This is the biggest turn-off of Final Fantasy II to players, and I don’t blame them. I especially don’t blame players who had to try and figure out everything without the manual guiding them through this incredibly involved leveling system. I found the manual and guidebook for FFII on Internet Archive, and even with that by my side I constantly had to look at it over and over to remember what exactly I had to do to level-up myself up. Eventually, I just wrote and drew a shitty guide just for myself so I could more easily memorize it. In the end, I got there! Then I had to read and memorize all the new magic spells! Oh, well. As someone who loves journaling and taking notes, I really didn’t mind it, but of course I can understand how unbearable it could be for someone who doesn’t like it. It reminded me, again, of tabletop gaming and how when I play that with friends, I often fill a whole booklet with my little notes. Maybe I was used to it? Maybe I just felt it immersed me better into the story, and helped me feel more understanding of how the gameplay meshed with the narrative. In the end, it helped me gain a bit of an emotional attachment to it all; characters and game mechanics alike.

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Well, how would I compare it to my friend now, after finishing it? I’ve been told the Romancing Saga series takes heavy inspiration from it mechanically, and by the time I finished I could see the Star Wars parallels loud and clear. Obviously, it has its Wizardry, Ultima, and Dragon Quest influences… What didn’t back then? But how would I describe FF2?

It’s broken, it’s unreliable, it’s confusing. But it’s also rewarding, emotional, and easy to get wrapped into. It tried crazy things for both the time and platform it released on, but it found its people, and its people found it.

Final Fantasy II is like Final Fantasy II. You wanna know what THAT means? Well, play it and you’ll find out!

4/5

you thought halo ce aged poorly?

...then how the hell was bungie utterly outshining that game's level design a whopping 7+ years before it was even conceived?! for a game of so many firsts in first person shooters, it's unnerving how little recognition marathon gets. not to mention how many of its pioneered ideas are often wrongfully attributed to the likes of half life; health stations, friendly npcs and narrative drive, to name a few

more than anything being falsely credited however, i'm upset that this melee combat hasn't been actively replicated by literally every succeeding fps. typically when playing a shooter - especially on harder difficulties - most people start pissing their pants as soon as they fire their last clip. doom with fists only? duke with his shoe? sure, it's been done for challenge's sake, but is it ever optimal?

it is in marathon because your fists don't deal static damage - rather their power increases with speed. on total carnage, the most standard enemy can eat 6 whole pistol rounds before he croaks; that's trivialized to 3 quick meetings between fist and face if you know what you're doing. simply put, punching dudes till they explode is insanely addictive. tell me this isn't the sickest shit and i'll rightfully call you a liar

a few of the levels here would make halo's library check the fuck out (colony ship for sale and pfhoraphobia most notably) but despite the sadism, i'd call most everything here pretty well designed and memorable thanks to some solid puzzles and smartly-placed save points. weapons are fairly basic, but the alternate firing modes (another bungie-birthed fps mechanic - go figure) help vary things up a good bit. shoutouts to the fusion pistol, flamethrower and whatever the fuck that alien gun is in particular - especially the alien gun because i adore it

narratively, there's definitely stuff of interest being brewed and i'm more invested here than i ever was in the original halo's plot, but i can tell things are just getting started. so onward i go - to durandal...

initially was going to convey this in a meaner, snarkier way for the bit but with how this game tied into trigger closer to the end i decided not to. the game is not subtle about how it feels having to follow up a dream team project like trigger and a certain set of characters basically have to refrain themselves from explicitly saying serge ruined chrono trigger, and because of that i would honestly feel kind of bad bringing that kind of attitude with this review. regardless, while i played chrono cross, the main thought that went through my head was "how is it that people thought cross didn't live up to trigger rather than the other way around?" but as i finished the game and write this review i feel as though cross didn't need to live up to trigger and that hinging its value on whether or not it does is a very childish way of looking at things.

to me, chrono trigger is a game that is held back by how near perfect it is. there's so little wrong with it that at least to me nothing really stands out anymore. there's nothing to grab onto, no imperfections to make it feel "complete" to me and as such i feel as though its reverence, while not necessarily misplaced, is harder for me to grasp because to me a "perfect" game without imperfections, as contradictory as it sounds, will never be perfect to me. meanwhile, chrono cross i found to be an amazing, thought provoking, mesmerizing game that pushed the playstation to its limits aesthetically, a game with so much to say about what it means to live and exist, what it means to dream. chrono cross is messy and imperfect in such beautiful ways, it knows its following up chrono trigger and while it still intends to be a continuation of a work like trigger it doesn't care what kind of shadow its living in and intends to be its own experience, flaws and all.
whether or not it lives up to chrono trigger is irrelevant, the arguments surrounding such are just attempts at insecure and childish posturing because these games, while connected are so different that its hardly worth comparing in that sense. i understand that nothing exists in a vacuum, let alone a sequel, but maybe it would do some people a lot of good to both understand the context of something like chrono cross while also letting it be its own experience.

Another entry from my List of the Thirty-Five Best Games I Played in 2023, now available à la carte:

On Chrono Cross (Or — "How I Developed a Palate for Poison")

My grandmother doesn’t live in Vermont anymore. A couple years ago, she and I went back there together and rented a place to relive those days. Naturally, the rental had some similarities to her old place. We drove around, taking in familiar sights, waiting for the rest of the family to join us. I fired up Chrono Cross for the first time one evening, and promptly came down with a case of water poisoning.

If I believed in omens, I’d take that as a bad one. I touched a game about a character who finds himself in an eerie facsimile of home, itself the strange and twisted sequel of a beloved favorite, and it left me hurling into a toilet. The water supply we’d been drawing from was unfit for human consumption. I spent the recovery period with Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest V on DS, beneath the more familiar ceiling of a family friend’s house. I’d later start writing a non-review about how I didn’t have to play Chrono Cross, eschewing the pretense of being some aspiring member of the Backloggd “videogame intelligentsia.” I don’t need “cred,” right??

Well.

I played Chrono Trigger again in 2023 at least twice, depending on how you define a “playthrough”. The first was because I’d just finished Final Fantasy X and wanted to make some unfair comparisons. The second was because I was three-fourths of the way through Chrono Cross and…wanted to make some unfair comparisons. Even in the thick of it, I was avoiding the inevitable.

So…About the Game

Cross makes every effort possible to be anything but a clean, obedient sequel to its father. And you know what? Good. Trigger’s development was predicated on originality, and should likewise be followed up with another adventurous convention-breaker. The “Chrono Trigger 2” advocated by the likes of Johnny Millennium doesn’t appeal to me; lightning doesn’t strike twice. Still, Cross is Trigger’s opposite even in ways it really shouldn’t be.

With the exception of its original PSX audiovisual presentation, some of the most colorful and lush I’ve ever experienced, just about every one of its ideas is noncommittal and indecisive. Monsters appear on the overworld again, but you won’t find anything as deliberately paced as Trigger’s level design to elevate this from the status of "mild convenience." The conceit of its combat system is worth exploring – characters deal physical damage to build spell charges — but the deluge of party members and fully customizable spell slots amounts to a game that would’ve been impossible to balance. Level-ups are only granted during boss fights, and the gains acquired in normal battles aren’t worth the effort, so the whole thing snaps in half not 50% of the way through. It isn’t measured to account for the fact that you can take down just about everything with an onslaught of physical attacks by the midgame.

Then again, if the combat had been as challenging as the story is bizarre, I don’t know that I would’ve stuck around all the way to the end. Maybe I wouldn’t have been as gung-ho about swapping party members around and collecting them like Pokémon. Amid its spectacle and ambition, the wonder of sailing the seas and crossing dimensions, I left most events unsure of what to think, positive or negative. It wasn’t ambivalence, exactly.

SPOILERS AHEAD

It’s like this: Fairly early on, you’re given an infamous decision. One of the major protagonists, Kid, is dying of a magically-inflicted illness, and the only antidote is Hydra Humour. If you agree to go after it, you’ll find that it can only be extracted from the Guardian of the Marshes, and its death would mean the deterioration of the ecosystem which relies upon it. The dwarves and all other life in this biome would be put at risk. I weighed my options. I decided to reload a save and refuse the quest. Kid wouldn’t want her life to come at the cost of hundreds, if not thousands of others. So I start down the opposite path…

…Only to find that, in this route, a squad of human soldiers kills the hydra anyway, leaving the dwarves to flee their uninhabitable home to lead a genocidal attack on the fairies’ island to claim it for themselves. Jesus. The dwarves’ manic strangeness did little to downplay how chilling the result of my little coin flip was.

After an effort to defend the few remaining fairies and keep the dwarves at bay — leaving the survivors to process the turmoil of their new reality — after all that…it turns out that Kid is fine. She got over the illness by herself, offscreen.

For as many words as it goes on to spew, no moment of my Chrono Cross playthrough spoke louder than this one. Chrono Trigger’s party was faced with a choice — allow Lavos to erupt from the planet and drive everything to the brink of extinction, or risk everything to prevent the apocalypse. It’s a thousand years away, these three characters can live out the rest of their days comfortably and never have to concern themselves with it. They’re shown an End of Time, proof that the universe won’t last regardless of what they do, and still decide to fight on behalf of the world. It’s worth trying, if only to preserve a few more precious seconds of life for their descendants and their home.

Chrono Cross (eventually) reveals that their meddling allowed Lavos to become an even more devastating monster. We can defeat it, but who can say that won’t result in an even more cataclysmic fate? Because he lives and breathes, Serge’s timeline is worse off. It’s hard to tell whether that’s lore nonsense, self-flagellation on the game’s part, or genuine philosophizing. It wouldn’t be alone in that. As a chronic “downer,” I can’t help wondering if there’s no way to survive in the modern world without directly or indirectly participating in human suffering.

Maybe Writer/Director Masato Kato couldn’t either. He seems bent on reminding the player that they are but a speck in a cosmic puzzle, and there’s no defiant “so what?” answer to that problem. Even the thing we’ve been led to accomplish isn’t revealed until seconds before the finale of this forty hour game (and that's NOT a joke). You can’t see the credits without recognizing that it’s an unfortunate victim of mismanagement and a little too much Evangelion, but that doesn’t mean it fails to resonate. I don't think there’s another game that so thoroughly captures the existential confusion of being alive.

the epitome of every common id tech 4 complaint; a show-offy tech demo with not much to actually show

prey seems to be far more concerned with its novel-at-first gravity shifting, portal hopping and other gimmickry than it is with delivering a fun shooter. almost every weapon feels pretty weak, enemies are as generic as they come and the level design is frustratingly boring - especially when it teases its potential so irritatingly often

there's some really cool aesthetic direction here - sometimes. the sphere's strange fusions of human civilization and mechanical-organic hodgepodge future tech that's reminiscent of quake's strogg is REALLY FUCKING COOL. but it's actively sidelined and little more than something to glance at in passing during the actual levels - steel halls with constant gravity walks, enemies popping out of portals and the occasional vehicle sequence. it's lame!

tommy's kind of an annoying jackass for most of the story. he embodies "Fuck off I don't believe in that made up nonsense" and constantly whines about how his heritage is a bunch of superstitious gobbledygook... even while he's literally talking to his deceased grandfather in the afterlife. though i guess i can't really blame him for not giving a shit, because his supernatural ability amounts to little more than being able to walk through forcefields and push the buttons behind them (usually to turn said forcefields off)

oh and to never die - tommy's really good at keeping his soul alive via 10 second bursts of spiritual whack-a-mole. i guess that works out because it means none of the dull shooting ever needs to be gone through a second time, but i'd have gladly taken some guns that actually felt satisfying instead. out of his arsenal, which is primarily driven by different flavors of machine guns, the only weapon i found especially great was the leech gun. i guess the weird caustic paint-splattering shotgun is kinda neat too. the grenades look cool but are functionally reminiscent of quake 2's, which is not a compliment at all and i barely touched them because of it

narratively, things pick up substantially in the last four missions. considering there's 21 of them, that's not a fantastic ratio, but it ended on an interesting enough note for me to wish prey 2 wasn't cancelled. so that counts for something

still, i find it hard to believe that a sequel to this would've been nearly as good as arkane's 2017 release

...did we all play the same game?

'cause generic soundtrack aside, i don't even need to hesitate - this is superior to quake ii in just about every way. sure, there's no rocket jumping, but that hardly matters in a corridor shooter; what's important is gunplay and Q2 wishes it had weapons half as good as these. the shotgun? nailgun? the fucking bfg that shoots black holes? get the hell out of town and don't let me see you here again

...that praise being said, i'll be damned if it doesn't put its shakiest leg first

unlike quake ii, the start here isn't slow because of its shooting - that feels fantastic from the get go - instead it's the aggressively invasive 'story' that's constantly trying to pull you from the action. let me shoot. the fucking. aliens! that's all i wanna do, man!!

"nah nah - i hear you", calls tim willits, newly appointed president of the Carmack Fan Club, "here, you can shoot again - in a turret section! and after that, ohoho, mission briefing!! and then - two more vehicle segments!!!"

with one swift motion i knock that shit out of his fucking hands. then i scream, "I JUST WANT TO SHOOT THE STROGG WITH MY SHOTGUN. THAT'S LITERALLY ALL I WANT TO DO. I DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOUR SET PIECES (besides the mech one - that was pretty cool) OR YOUR SPACE MARINE STORY - I DON'T EVEN CARE THAT I COULD PERSONALLY WALK FASTER THAN MY CHARACTER WITH WEIGHTS STRAPPED TO MY LEGS. THE GUNS FEEL GOOD, TIM. PLEASE JUST LET ME USE THE FUCKING GUNS!!!!"

i think he took that bit about space marines harshly given the events that transpired shortly after, but all of my prayers had been answered nonetheless! no longer was i walking back and forth through areas i'd already visited just to report to some dumbass military man that the elevator got unjammed or steve blum #3 successfully completed filing his tax returns; i was actually playing the game - uninterrupted

when quake 4 gets its shit fully together after the first 1/3 or so, it shifts from stop-and-go into maximum overdrive. there's zero bad weapons, enemy types continue to vary enough (not to mention there's actually a couple decent bosses - a rarity for shooters) and ironically even the mission objectives become significantly more engaging when they're things you're doing and not just details off sgt. pvt. blum's shopping list

environments start looking a lot cooler too. Q2 toyed with body horror in small doses, but ravensoft went all-in here. call me simple, edgy, whatever - i think giant entrails breaching through space corridors and limbless (but still alive and wiggling) bodies being used as power supplies are pretty fucking rad. say what you will about id tech 4 - doom 3 looks fantastic and this is no different. hands down the most underrated shooter engine

misguided start aside, this is the best fps (barring quake 1, obviously) that i've played in a considerably long time. can't wait to receive matthew kane's next orders in quake 5!

wait fuck

went into this completely blind; didn't even know it wasn't a quake sequel. also tried the original version first, which definitely made for rough initial impact

quake ii kicks off in a way that i can lightly describe as "complete dog shit". for some ungodly reason, Club Carmack decided it'd be a nice idea to start players off with the worst pistol and shotgun combo known to mankind (even complete without muzzle flash if the og release is your preference). the fun doesn't stop not starting there, though, because then you pick up the grenades and boy oh boy - my personal favorite aspect about them is how they take 35 years to throw, which makes them only remotely viable either around corners or as a tool to very slowly kill yourself with

it was during the entirety of this first level that i thought to myself, "why does this suck so much fucking dick? who enjoys this? can john carmack really be trusted to call steve jobs an idiot for designing a mouse with one button when he actually thinks quake ii is fun?" then i got the one-two punch: the super shotgun and the chaingun

suddenly - enemies died from being shot. i no longer needed to constantly pop from cover to reliably fight hitscan baddies spongier than those seen in 'chasm: the rift' (which, ironically, is a quake clone). things only went up from here - especially in level 3 where the 90 or so grenades i'd been eagerly not using were finally given purpose via a launcher that didn't have 600 frames of startup. i'd say this is when the game really begins

...and barring the last stage - which definitely gets to a point of feeling sluggish due to its over-eagerness in spamming the most aggravatingly tanky two-legged enemy in the game - it doesn't let up. every later earned weapon (that isn't the rocket launcher) continues to feel pretty fantastic. the BFG in particular took me by surprise with its insane splash and chain damaging. you can fire this thing at one enemy and it'll clear out an entire fucking room. it's awesome and thanks to it using the same ammo as the standard laser rifle, there's no shortage of opportunities to let it loose

i'm not much for movement tech in my fps, but the levels here were designed in ways where i was pretty eager to push myself even on that front. lotsa opportunity to master bunnyhopping and circle jumping. i even skipped some chunks of levels with a few well-placed rocket jumps. fun stuff and it made me just a little more interested in giving quake 3 another shot

sonically and atmospherically, everything's obviously downgraded from q1 due to the lack of trent reznor (note: "HUH" is still intact (phew)) but the sonic mayhem soundtrack isn't totally unwelcome. i'll certainly take a competent albeit standard metal ost over the mick gordon-branded djent slop that this genre is so overly saturated with now

i've yet to play any expansions, but i did try a smidge of the n64 stages and found them to be really charming. kinda surreal to see a take of this game with so much color in it. definitely gonna get back to that, but for now i think i'm just gonna go straight for quake 4

"wait - you haven't played quake?"
~almost everyone who i've gushed about this to game in the past few days

a little about me: i'm partial to industrial grit, my favorite doom games favor grimly edgy atmosphere over 80s thrash worship, i'm a big NIN fan and the downward spiral is one of my top 5 favorite albums. so this should be a no brainer, right?

well - yeah, actually. that's exactly right. throughout my playthrough all i could continually ask myself was, "why the fuck didn't i play this sooner?" and rightfully so. i think the reason quake has eluded me for so long is because its holistic reputation is eclipsed at this point by a diehard multiplayer community that i frankly don't give a shit about. i'm not much of a multiplayer enthusiast for anything - let alone tech-y arena shooters - and honestly i probably would've continued ignoring this absolute fucking masterpiece if not for my pressing curiosity towards trent reznor's involvement

that'd have been a huge mistake; quake is easily the best boomer shooter i've ever played

this is where i could talk about how i adore the weapons and their balancing, the general focus on straightforward maps with powerups everywhere, the difficulty being largely driven by how easy it is to kill yourself in tight spaces - or even the god tier ambient score that has just the right amounts of otherworldly screams and metallic chords strewn about - i COULD go into those things and we could be here for a considerable amount of time - but instead of doing any of that, i'm just going to say that the shambler is one of the greatest enemy designs in any fps. in fact, my feeling towards quake 1 can be summarized roughly with my thoughts on the shambler; he's absolutely perfect. i love this giant, dopey, teethy foreskin man in all his fleshy (not furry - fuck you) glory. and i haven't even begun to MENTION his timbs yet

my mans butters be outright otherworldly