There's really no other way to put it. This game (and possibly franchise) is morally and creatively bankrupt. Between the shallow depictions of mental health whether there's dramatic zooms of the protagonist self harming or even going as far to have chapters end with you jumping off a building and the following interludes flash a suicide hotline message until the level loads or the awkward anime dub tier voice acting berate you with insults or commentary on your surroundings because Konami needs to remind you this is in a fact a serious game and they're afraid of leaving things to interpretation, I fail to see how the 2 hours I spent with this tech demo can leave me anticipation of the upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake or "missing the point".

This whole experience ends up feeling like a parody of the thing it's trying to comment and I don't think that's the takeaway someone with diagnosed BPD should be feeling.

Of course I was going to love Psychonauts 2, the 20-years later miracle sequel to one of my all-time favorite games. Every level was fun to play at worst and stunning at best, and if there were no Milkman-level levels then at least there were no meat circuses in the entire bunch. Deeper characters? We got deeper characters, baby. We’re talking Jack Black as a gay hippie learning how to use his five senses again after spending years without a body, his alcoholic depressed husband finally learning to process his grief, dogen boole’s father battling a nasty case of co-dependency, and Raz learning about the importance of consent in a riff on the meat circus from the last game, this one being a casino-hospital. We have a great surprise twist villain late in the game with probably the most fun level out of all of them, and czarist Russian kitsch to boot. We have Lilli no longer just a stock tsundere character but a fun supporting character with motivations of her own. I mean the first game treated its mentally ill characters sympathetically, but it was still a Saturday morning cartoon tone, they never made me want to weep. Psychonauts 2, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll fard and shid your pant.

Why did I only give it 4.5 stars instead of a perfect five? I’m so glad you asked. The one thing that cost the game an entire half star is the interns. The goddam interns. I hate the interns so much.

One of the small joys of the first game among many is interacting with the other children in the camp. It’s a microcosm of any typical middle-school age group of kids: some of them are kind of awkward and weird, some of them are pretty cool, some are annoying but you can’t help but like them anyway, some are irrationally mean and you just stay away from them, and a few of them are just straight-up bullies. It’s entirely optional to interact with the kids after a mission, and often rewarding if you do.

In Psychonauts 2, this diverse group of kids is replaced by about six or so insufferable little cunts. They start out mean to Raz for no reason, and they stay mean for the whole game. And not just mean, but mean in a way that is completely narratively flat. There’s no context in the intern program itself that motivates this behavior, competition or what have you, since no one’s like in danger of getting kicked out one by one, reality-tv show style or anything like that. Theres nothing that differentiates either of them also; one of them is mean but likes yo-yos, one is mean but can also control ice, one of them is mean but also likes indie rock music. One of them fools you by being somewhat nice at first before actually being meaner than all the others. And oh yeah, let’s not forget my favorite one, who is mean to you but ALSO mean to animals! Har de har har.

There is barely a whiff of an opportunity for them to change their attitude when Raz saves them from a tough spot, with Raz having absolutely no motivation to do so outside of “I’m a decent human being and I suppose even these dickheads don’t deserve an eternal I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream fate.” Would you be surprised if I told you they don’t? And after this moment, every single collectible side quest is given to you by these asshole kids. Worse still, the collectibles are all extensions of them being shitty to you. The scavenger quest given to you by Ford Cruller in the first game is like a fun camp activity, whereas here its obviously a waste of time given to you by the head bitchy character who is holding your clothes hostage. Another one involves turning off machines which surprise surprise, the mean intern forgot to tell you are dangerous.

Check out this scene, for example. First of all, it’s important to understand that I already do not like this character at all, and then this game insists that it’s hee-larious to see her treat animals like an emotionally abusive mother for like a minute and a half. It’s an ugly and honestly hard to watch scene, and for what? There’s no narratively-significant reason for this, it just automatically plays when you enter the diner. Look, I’m not that thin-skinned, it could have been funny if like there was a reason for Raz to be here, if like he had to put up with it to get the pancakes from her, or if she was unexpectedly nice before and he was like “sure, pancakes, Sam should be a pushover, how hard could it be,” just like, something, man.

When the bully in the first game, a far less interesting one by the way, first starts doing his bully shit, Raz immediately sticks up for himself. It’s baffling that such a huge chunk of this game, with so many wonderfully-realized supporting characters elsewhere, forces you to watch Raz just become a human punching bag for so long, and it’s exhausting every time you have to sit through it. And then your family shows up, and they’re mean to you too! Jesus!

All this, and then for the tiniest token gesture of support during the final boss where they all get no-scoped anyway, they become junior agents along with Raz! Why? Raz did all the work! I bet you, just like the people you went to high school with who were mean to you and then wonder why you don’t give them the time of day as adults, they’re all going to act like they have a shared experience or some shit that’s going to make them think they’ll be friends forever. Bitch, you stole my clothes on my first day of school, get out of my goddam life!

A stupendous game otherwise, of course, and I guess to be fair, despite all the ink I spilled on it, it’s a small enough issue to just ignore if you really want to.

Many people looking for the art in the video game industry are looking for specific things they can take away from each game, a specific message whether posed narratively or thematically. I don't mean to imply Shadow of the Colossus is lacking something deeper in regards to a message, but it proves the most artistic element of video games as a medium, is all in the name; the visuals and interactivity, packaged as one. Mechanics and spectacle became effectively inseparable in Shadow of the Colossus due to the heavy reliance on the camera, placement of fur and everchanging hitboxes of the Colossi which are perfectly mapped to sync up with what you see, thus meaning the two most core elements of the medium are in harmony. This is all important as Shadow of the Colossus is a mechanically simple game reliant on puzzle-centric bosses where the most truly crucial element is how it makes you feel, yet it's separated from a "movie game" by the fact interaction is never really taken away from you. The most clear example of this in Shadow of the Colossus is how it uses R1 to force you to cling on for dear life; you cannot let go for a second or you need to restart the boss fights intended sequence which allows for some beautifully tense moments of hope and exhilaration that no other medium could ever possibly replicate. These are all simple technical descriptors of a game that quite simply cannot be described on pure technicality; it embodies everything that make video games my absolute favorite form of art in that you cannot climb a giant and describe it only through words or pictures. Memories form based off of experiences and not based off of descriptions, video games tell stories through experiences and the artistic merit is entirely about the importance that experience had to you in life rather than just an intended effect. You couldn't get the same feel of awe from someone telling you the story of their personal fight against a great Kaiju via climbing it, you have to do it.

Watched it instead of played because I don't have a PS5 lmao

Lots of potential, but sadly all of it feels squandered on laughable writing that you would think was written by a teenager in their edgy phase, and what sometimes feels like amateur, stilted voice acting, which results in the game being hard to engage and immerse oneself with.

To be honest, this doesn't even feel like a Silent Hill entry, but that franchise has been in a rut for the past long while. The message is there somewhere about mental health and the impact of social media on vulnerable youth, but all of it is lost beneath this messy incoherence and problems surrounding the actual game.

The only good parts of this game appear to be the soundtrack (Akira Yamaoka doing the thing he does best), the presentation; the game looks good visually, and the monster design is really neat.

It's a shame. It is especially damning to rag on this title because of the fact that it is free, and knowing a group of people worked hard on this, but I just can't recommend this seeing how there are much better games you can spend your time in.

With the release of Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe I knew I had two options: drop about sixty dollars on the rerelease that adds big garish black outlines to the characters as if something about the original's presentation made the action inscrutable, or put the iso of the original on my Wii's hard drive and play a much better looking game... With the Wiimote sideways. Well shit, that was a pretty easy call all the way to the end.

Frankly, I've found a lot of Nintendo's rereleases on Switch to be pretty uncompelling and settled on discomfort. I should get a pro controller if I'm going to play more Wii games, holding the Wiimote sideways might be the single worst way to experience any Nintendo game. What a garbage setup, with its prank D-pad and hard edges digging into your palm... At least Return to Dream Land plays well and is so enjoyable that even despite this horrid controller setup, I often found myself thinking "damn, this might be as good as The Crystal Shards."

Return to Dream Land is about as straight-forward a Kirby game as it gets. At least in single player. I get the feeling one of the big draws to this one is playing with friends, but nobody is willing to come over and watch Kirby and Meta Knight smooch with me. Tragic, I know. On some level, Return feels antiquated, with only Super Abilities and a very minimal amount of Wiimote waggling offering anything new to the typical Kirby formula, but I think adhering to tradition makes Return comfortably nostalgic.

That adherence to expected gameplay and inclusion of co-op makes this a friendly entry point, too. Not that most people reading a Backloggd review will struggle with Kirby's notoriously easy brand of gameplay, but I grabbed a copy of Deluxe for my niece after learning about how much she adores Kirby, and she's had a great time playing it with her mom. I'm 36 and had just as good of a time playing this hunched in front of a CRT. That's uh, the power of Kirby.

Here, at the bottom of the dying sea, running through the last bastions of humanity, where even the machines screaming in sheer pain, rotten to the very core and with nightmares beyond our wildest dreams reshaping what was once built, down here, with life taking its last gasps for air… NOT EVEN HERE I’M SAFE FROM SPIDER LOOKING-ASS CREATURES OH JESUS H. CHRIST I’M GONNA HAVE A HEART ATTA―

Playing Soma has been one of the most difficult gaming-related experiences I’ve ever had, not because it’s a particularly challenging game ―most of its puzzles and monsters, while always superbly designed and distinct from each other while also managing to find ways to make everything fit in, are rarely difficult, puzzles being especially forgiving and never too complicated, and the enemies, while menacing, are turned into much more forgiving obstacles thanks to your surprising durability and the amount of opportunities given to you to breath and analyze the situation after getting caught by any of them―, in fact I’m pretty sure I only died two times across the entire game, and only one of those deaths was ‘caused by an active foe, so yeah, Soma is everything but a hard horror game, so that’s not why I took so much time to beat it, no… but rather because it’s one of the few pieces of media that’s made me feel actually physically ill.

The installations of Pathos-II only get more decayed and seem to be more poisoned than the last, a horrifying amalgam of organic life and metal that’s sickening, but that still grabs you with the beautiful seascapes of the deep blue, especially at the beginning. There’s still some beauty at the end of the world, some sense of lingering past glory remaining in what was once a glorious center point for investigation and progress, but that only gets blurrier and blurrier as the game goes on, to the point the only thing visible is sheer horror. This alone could at times make me feel dizzy, a repulsion I couldn’t really scratch off, it’s sci-fi visual horror brought to its more grounded and depressing limit, and yet, it’s gripping. Every single area, be it the outside in the dark depths or inside one of the many facilities, shares the same visual corruption of the WAU and the general architecture of Pathos-II, but it still feels ever changing, with each of the massive metal blocks serving a different purpose, and the WAU’s many experiments to accomplish its objective taking a more twisted form at every step, it’s such a tangible horror, but still one hard to comprehend at first sight. Soma’s visual style is one of nightmares, too perfect and too horrifying, forged by human and mechanical minds, but if Soma was only that, a trip across scary futuristic places with monsters thrown in there, it would still be a commendable visual achievement, but nothing more remarkable beyond that. Luckily, this tale has a few things to say.

Immediately after Simon’s ‘’photoshoot’’ and his awakening, the game gets what some would call ‘’spooky’’, there’s some really oppressing ambience and some pretty stressful situations, but it’s mostly just that, scary in a more perceptive level, simply because things look weird and there isn’t any context that allows to begin understanding it. And horror usually works at its fullest on those contexts, when you don’t fully know what you are up against, the fear of the unknown is a extremely powerful tool… and still, the more I learnt about Soma, the more logs and files I read, the more places I visited, the more characters I talked to, the more things I did… I was just even more horrified by it. From site Upsilon to Omega, Soma feels like a true hell, a hell made from dreams and run by an AI; the WAU and its monsters are terrifying to go up against, a legion of creatures forced to ‘’live’’, from walking automats forced to waddle along the corridors and seafloor as their mind is still stuck in a past that just isn’t anymore, to impossibilities of flesh and the abhorrent, engulfed by such a perpetual pain that the only way they seemingly can communicate it is through inflicting to others; this artificial mind is pretty creative when it comes to making what should be dead still breath, and its while gaining more understanding of it that more questions appeared, and it became more and more nightmarish. The WAU seems like a rogue AI, but in reality, it simply sought a way to fully accomplish its objective, in a way, this whole ordeal was still our species’ fault, a byproduct of the investigators at Pathos-II to maintain everything beyond its limits; even at the end of the world, humans still find ways to create unimaginable suffering… tho at this point, who’s to say that the WAU can’t really ‘’think’’…

Beyond its interesting history and rich future world, all so amazingly detailed and fascinating to learn on, what compelled me about Soma above of all else and what elevated all those aspects to a brand-new horizon are its themes. Soma doesn’t take too long to ask the question: At what point what we can still be considered human? What’s the limit before we stop being… us? This is not a easy question, to say the least, Soma explores every single possible angle of it, it never feels ‘’pretentious’’ because the game always finds interesting things to explore with it. Simon is the perfect main character to throw into this dilemma, a normal guy that took a coin-toss and ended up here, decades after his time, and on his new condition he can only ponder and question himself, his existence; he’s an amazing protagonist not so much because he says sensical things, but mainly because he’s as lost and afraid as we are, and every single task and act has a monumental conundrum tied with it in a way that makes sense and I honestly wished he had even more things to say. Catherine works amazingly both as its own character and person and a reflection of Simon’s thoughts, she isn’t cold, but she’s more decided about her own condition as a machine, more accepting and understanding of what she is or what she implies, both because she has a more in-depth understanding of how… everything about this works and because she just doesn’t feel as alien in its new form as Simon does, and as such, she doesn’t ask herself the same or similar questions. Simon and Cath bounce from each other perfectly, their conversations being either extremely calm or incredibly tense, and moments like their chat during the last descent are moments that I can only qualify as… beautiful… Their trip is one full of misfortune as never-ending problems carried from mistakes from the past, there’s no real victory at any point, and those moments where it should be one are short lived, and only bring more haunting memories or impossible questions.

Questions asked to you.

At each of the main sites, you may encounter persons, or rather its remains; the last humans put on a state of eternal life, corpses with each a story to tell if it hasn’t been wiped yet, and minds placed in robots that cannot fully understand their condition, and sometimes, in these encounters, there are decisions to be made. The game only has one ending, this story only has one possible outcome, but the game still lets you decide. You can spare other’s their suffering by taking a more difficult option or path, you can leave some people still ‘’alive’’, you revive a person over and over again just to get a bit of information that you need, and yet with every single possible path, the question always lingers… is their conscience, their mind, even real? And for those that are still human, is that a life that’s worth living? Many characters in Soma find their own, sometimes more extreme answers to that, while others never manage to find it, like Simon, but then it also asks you. The game throws these same questions at the player, and that’s where much of the horror plays out, when you begin to contemplate if you are truly inflicting pain to someone else or if it’s just a mere reflection of a past life, if you’ll do the same act that you once considered extreme not so long ago, if sharing the same mind makes both lives the same, or if one’s more meaningful than the other. This is when the horror of Soma shows itself, it’s not the monsters, the metal corridors or the spooky sea spiders, it’s what’s beneath it all, a question that doesn’t expect itself to be answered, one that maybe shouldn’t be done in the first place, or maybe it should in spite of the internal turmoil it can bring.

I took every step in this game with doubt and more questions than answers, with horror and shame, and it was not until close to the end, where I met a character that hadn’t shown up until that point, that the final decision was for me to be made, and this time the answer was clear, and in a mix of a final definitive realization and sharing those final moments, I could only feel my eyes get teary…

Soma is a narrative marvel, a story that I wasn’t expecting to cause me to ask so many questions and think about it so much, and in those moments after I stopped playing after a session, those stuck out of my mind as much as the terror, if not more, tho that’s part for the course since they kind of go hand in hand… It feels too real at times, too sickening, too horrible, but in the best possible form imaginable, it’s a horror that touches the soul, and it does so while looking astonishing and sticking with you, and it will stick with me for a long while; in a way, I feel as if there could be so much more to be talked about Soma, or maybe those are questions to ask oneself…

The game ends with yet another coin-toss, this time there may seem to be a clearer winner and loser, but in both outcomes, both lead to life in an endless abyss… but at least in one of them, the sun can shine again…

Much better the second time around. I was originally quite disappointed in Fading Afternoon compared to its predecessor (Stone Buddha not withstanding) The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa. I felt it leaned too much into the combat at the expense of what I most liked about Ringo, namely the character interactions between deeply human shitheads, the true roleplaying in the roleplaying game, the great soundtrack and existential angst. Those were still in the game but I felt as if they were drowned out by the endless button mashing combat.

I guess I should mention Spoilers from here on out

On a second run through, I liked the game quite a bit more. Now, I've never really subscribed to the notion of "playing a game wrong" but I think I was approaching Fading Afternoon with a somewhat unhelpful mindset, though I think it was somewhat of the game's doing that set me in that path. You see, in Fading Afternoon you play as Seiji Maruyama, a Yakuza enforcer recently released from prison (for what I assume was decades) who is also suffering from a terminal illness. Hence, given the mechanics of taking over territory from other Yakuza families through combat being an excellent way to make money (and necessary to advance the game's storyline) and my interpretation of Seiji's character I decided to fight the other families to leave Azuma a decent territory from what pitiful remains he has left.

Seiji and by extension the player's time is limited, as his illness is simulated through a decreasing max health stat constantly ticking down day (or week rather) after day. And given how much the game seemingly punishes dilly dallying (first time I did the first story mission I got slapped by Azuma cause I went to a place at the wrong time and couldnt go back the same day) well, It wasn't the best mindset to enjoy the game.

On a second time around however, I can see the perspective better. Whilst having to constantly go around defending/attacking places is still a thing, time seems to move when you transition from area to area rather than necessarily just time spent. And after discovering I could hire more thugs to defend my territories I started to enjoy seeing more of what the game had to offer whenever I went to an area with some kind of activity to do. I hit a stride much faster knowing what to do, buying a car, getting enough money to buy a house so I wouldnt have to pay the hotel every week, delegating the detective work to Seiji's protege Kato (and incidentally my favourite character in the game). I found some memorable interactions I wasn't aware of, like getting drunk and punching a dude at a bar and then flirting with his girlfriend, helping out a gambler at a casino and then having to pay off the loan sharks, sucking ass at baseball etc.

In the end though, my playthrough followed a similar path to last time, except now I didn't slap Kato, which led to me having to kill him. Thankfully I put enough cash to buy the house from the real estate office and then some into a bag and gave it to Kodama: Seiji's friend and reincarnation wizard. I then dispatched Ando, a Yakuza boss on behalf of Tanaka, another boss who had Seiji's Boss hostage and then I was forced to flee to what looked like Walter White's cabin from Breaking Bad. In character I decided Seiji would have taken up alcoholism, and went to the town bar to get drunk. Seiji must have overdone it though, because after stumbling drunk through the town he collapsed in the snow (incidentally I'm starting to think that the game's trigger to kill Seiji if he's knocked out is the snowfall) and unceremoniously died.

It's a deliberate anticlimax certainly, although I wonder if that was "the intended ending" or if I held out long enough Azuma would have called me to go bowling after that but as usual its hard to tell. Of course now its a bit more clear that pursuing each of the families will yield different endings and presumably also going after all of them, as well as deciding to slap Kato or not amongst other key choices. I do now know, that Seiji is trapped in the cycle of reincarnation described in Buddhism and will receive as much money as he put in the previous loop when Kodama hands him his bag. I also discovered you can kill yourself in this game pretty much at any point. That plus the yakuza loan sharks loaning up to 14m yen at a time gives me an idea for a funny exploit by just constantly looping and getting rich enough to just buy the Yakuza world outright.

The highlight of this playthrough was Kato, for good and for ill, given his ultimate fate. I enjoy the thematic and mechanical convergence of Seiji and his' relationship. Seiji is a yakuza legend slowly dying, so in combat he is an absolute beast but his illness makes him quite fragile, with the whole depleting max health thing, whereas Kato is a young hothead, his combat style is ungraceful and energetic, he levels up fast if you use him in combat. Seiji is sometimes referred as "Gozuki", a demon general from Buddhism who prevents sinners from escaping their penance. Early on, when Seiji is roughing up the streets Azuma mentions new youngsters are being inspired by his actions, including Kato most likely. I didn't reach the climax of that storyline but seemingly in one of them Kato was being set up to share Seiji's exact fate, being forced to spend most of his youth and life in prison in service to a band of thugs. Its not hard to see the parallels. You wonder then if thats the alusion to Gozuki, Seiji being a keeper of doomed souls to be trapped into a life of crime and violence. Though as we see in both the mechanics of the game and Seiji's own circumstances, he might be the one that's truly trapped here.

This is kind of where Fading Afternoon's weakness comes into play for me. I still think FA compared to Ringo punishes first time players beyond the usual obtuseness of Yeo's design simply by nature of the game's multiple endings and seeming ease with which Seiji meets an untimely end. I think I'll enjoy my third playthrough even more, but that first playthrough was rough, not only that but I find it hard to judge the story on a thematic level when so much of it I simply haven't seen. Thats on top of the fact that I still don't like Seiji much. Ringo was just, a lot more sympathetic and resonated with me more. Ultimately though, Yeo's games always give me something to talk about, I love em AND hate em but they're always kind of interesting.

I'd also like to apologize again to @Zoda, I was way out of line in that original exchange.

Also if anyone has played through all the endings, where the hell is Chiba? I picked him up from prison but by the time I found out where his bar was I could never find him. Do you have to just hang out with him inmediately before anything else? Does he just go there at specific times or what?

This was a very pleasant surprise. I absolutely love the concept, aesthetic, and music. I had a good time overall, this is much more enjoyable than the PICO-8 Celeste games in my opinion, but I do feel like it has some shortcomings in controls and polish that I wanted to talk about. These aren't a huge deal for a very short game made in a week, but I just think it's interesting.

There's some clear issues with the controls, particularly relating to the camera, that become much more obvious doing some of the more difficult B-Sides. Edges of platforms also feel particularly slippery where I feel like other games would be more generous, and Madeline is all too eager to perform a ledge climb when moving along a wall even when there are spikes on top that will instantly kill you. Many of the jumps in this game require a lot of active camera management to see where you're going, and since you also want your thumb on the face buttons to be able to dash mid-air you're constantly moving your grip back and forth. There are no control options whatsoever, and in most games I'd settle for being able to put dash on a shoulder button. I generally think taking common actions off of the face buttons in games that use both analog sticks is a good idea and fully solves a lot of issues like this, but here it feels like it would still be a band-aid solution.

The problems with the camera go deeper. For one thing, I think putting the ability to zoom in and out on the right stick's Y-axis was a mistake, you're not going to be getting perfectly horizontal inputs every time you want to turn the camera, so over the course of a series of jumps with quick camera turns you can find the camera at a very different angle than you intended. This is especially annoying since the camera doesn't reset when you respawn and you almost always have to adjust it before each attempt at a section. It's also often very hard to judge distance, I found myself under or overshooting small platforms a lot of the time. I've played a lot of 3D platformers and this is not an issue I usually have, and I had to think for a bit about what the actual cause is, which I think comes down to a couple of things. I think the developers realized this problem as well, since they included a very exaggerated guide that's enabled by default, rather than the traditional shadow below your character there's also a dotted line that extends from you to the ground. I don't think this solves the issue however.

The camera does a lot less automated movement than the average 3D platformer. In Super Mario 64 the developers only had a single analog stick to work with, and were also designing for players new to 3D games entirely, so they made the camera movement largely automatic, keeping it at a good angle behind Mario as he moved, with buttons left only for larger adjustments. Even with the move to dual-analog controllers, most 3D platformers since have largely copied this behavior. Celeste 64 seems to expect the player to do a lot more of this camerawork on their own, which is a decision I can understand sounding good on paper but doesn't really work in this genre. An interesting side-effect of this is that I think a lot of how distance is perceived is through seeing the edges of objects or textures move as the camera moves, and when the camera is at a locked angle even though the player is moving this makes the scene appear flat.

While fixing that problem would go a long way, I think there's also just an inherent issue with the amount of air control expected from Celeste's mechanics when applied to a 3D space. Most 3D platformers give you a lot of control in how you start your jump, but once you're in the air you're mostly just expected to make minor adjustments to ensure you land in the right spot. Completely changing your trajectory in the air and having to use that precisely is a lot more challenging, and even as someone who has played many difficult platformers I think that type of challenge is more awkward than it is fun. It's still probably possible to make a better-controlling game around this idea, with a better camera and level design that keeps this in mind and tries to avoid the awkward situations, but I think this game shows how difficult that would be to make properly.

While I mainly focused on negatives so far, I did have a very nice time with this overall. The play area feels packed with secrets and I was really impressed with the number of B-Sides. The ideas taken from Mario and the way they're implemented is great, I love the inclusion of 64's side-jump, and the short B-Side levels as secrets fit in great with the more open exploration. Like I mentioned at the start the game looks and sounds great, especially so for something put together so quickly. For something that took me under 3 hours to 100% the downsides are easy to overlook, and I had a really fun time with it.

I somehow failed to unlock Yuffie during my first playthrough of Final Fantasy VII, having made the fatal mistake of saving before speaking with her and getting my god damned gil stolen. About as successful as any Shin Megami Tensei recruitment attempt, frankly. At the time, I didn't even realize Yuffie and Vincent were optional characters; I was aware of them and just assumed you unlocked them as part of the story. Oh well, she stole my money, but I'm sure she'll be back around, and then we'll go on all kinds of crazy adventures together...

Naturally, I did a more complete playthrough of Final Fantasy VII sometime after my disastrous first run, and being as Yuffie is optional, I found she doesn't really have much agency over the story. Sure, there's plenty of interesting side content involving her and Vincent which helps build the world of FFVII and provide additional context for some of the game's larger narrative beats, but besides puking all over the Highwind and raining even more puke down onto unsuspecting citizens while skydiving into Midgar, she isn't given much to do.

So, at face value, Episode Intermission attempting to weave Yuffie into the core narrative of Remake is welcome, and I feel like there's far more character building and actual growth bottled up in its short 4-to-5 hour run than the entirety of the original game. There's still two more parts to the remake series, too! Yuffie fans are eating good (note: Yuffie fans are shattering their teeth on rock hard nuts, they are maniacs, and you should not trust them or accept any gifts from them)!

Intermission takes place roughly halfway through Remake, with Yuffie and her partner Sonon infiltrating Midgar to steal experimental materia from Shinra with the help of Avalanche. It's a little ironic that Avalanche's splinter cell is accused of working with Wutai operatives when the core branch of Avalanche was doing that all along, and throughout Yuffie's time in Midgar, she and Sonon both wonder if the more extreme sect ought to be who they partner up with. Also, there's a bunch of Compilation of Final Fantasy VII shit in here, and I can barely parse any of it from content exclusive to the Remake continuity. I will never play Dirge of Cerberus or read On the Way to a Smile, that is TOO MUCH FINAL FANTASY VII!

Yuffie's playstyle is a hybrid of close quarters and ranged combat and I like it quite a bit, though I never did get the hang of her parry timing or dodge ability. Not that they're necessary, but I feel like there's a skill ceiling there I never could reach. Being able to change the affinity of your basic attacks without the use of elemental materia is overly generous if it carries over into Rebirth but considering she's the only playable character in Intermission, it becomes an invaluable addition to her kit. Mug also compensates for a lackluster assortment of stealable items by applying a large amount of stagger at little cost.

It's a shame Sonon is not playable as I'm a sucker for any character that uses polearms, but hey, Cid is in Rebirth and I kinda get why they didn't want to overcomplicate the DLC. Dungeons, likewise, are pretty simplistic and don't have a whole lot going on, but good combat, great bosses, and an enjoyable story more than make up for how dry they are.

The true stand out feature of Intermission, however, is Fort Condor. Finally, the return of the persistent collectable mini-game to Final Fantasy. Much like the Fort Condor game in the original, it's a mini RTS/tower defense game, only it functions a whole hell of a lot better here and gives you a little something extra to work towards. Once you hit Shinra HQ, you're pretty much locked in until the credits roll, so most of my time with this was bottled up in the opening hour of the game, but I really hope it shows back up in Rebirth. I'm a huge slut for Tetra Master and I can see myself getting deep into this, too.

Now's a good time to jump into Intermission if you haven't already. It's worth the asking price and certainly seems like it will be required reading for Rebirth, and if you pick it up now you'll still have enough time to Google "what the hell is up with Nero?" before that game releases.