Played 2 hours and realized I just was not having any fun. I don't particularly like the weapon (his attack animations/feel). I have problems timing the parry and the dodge to the attack animations. I love big shields in Dark Souls, but that feeling is NOT the same as shielding in this game. I dont like that the first area is just a open area with some "ruins".

I got to the second area (a big safe zone city) and all my exploration drive went away. I do not want to hear any more talking, I don't want to explore anymore so I just quit.

Yeah I think the artstyle, setting, and music is a good change of pace for Souls-likes, but it I don;t like the combat so 👎

this game could beat my dog to death and i would still love it. pretty much every complain thrown its way boils down to "too hard :(", which is an only an issue if you've never exploited jank or save stated in your life. bloodborne could NEVER attain such gothy heights. i won't pretend this y2k quake engine iii game is front to back flawless level design - i'm a contrarian, not a psycho - but every area is very cozy and immersive (despite what gpu nerds may lead you to believe about the nature of video game immersion). i would live here. couldn't be any worse than florida.

haters, grow the hell up!!

If I could jump that high...would I ever find the ground again?

Is it bad to jump that high into the sky of nostalgia? To let yourself slip away and put your head into the clouds? Will those clouds of nostalgia turn you against your peers who don't see the vision? The vision of a children's playground for you to jump around to your heart's content? Planting yourself on a little conveyor and riding on it like a first-person roller coaster? Pretending to pet the non-threatening round green birds that chirp "kiwi!" if you dare to shoot them?

I wish I could jump like Robbit, I wish I could shoot lasers like Robbit, and I wish I could make funny noises whenever I took a step forward like Robbit. Why is life such a bore? Why can't it be just playgrounds and rainbows? Why can I not be just like my hero Robbit? Fighting funny evil men with funny palm tree jellyfish henchmen.

Was it my mom's fault that she bought me this during a time where I got nothing for a majority of the year due to being a poor December baby? Is she to blame for this mess? My poisonous care for a simple video game that I had played too much? The rare time where I can attach my mom to a game instead of my gamer dad? My yearning for days that I didn't need to care about getting up for work in the morning? When I didn't have a constant worry for the struggles of others? Is it truly bad for me? To just make me forget, and make me care only about smiling and struggling to hold back my emotions? To just, feel once more?

Is it bad for me to feel like a kid again? For just one hour?

Why must life be so grounded...?

Let's go Robbit, let's jump and go...for old times' sake once more....

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...

So, I'll admit, I did, a couple nights ago as of writing this, briefly play Human or Not? despite knowing it was AI and, although I wasn't certain, I could guess it probably would contribute to teaching the AI, which by itself can lead to unsavory consequences. I should have known better and shouldn't have contributed. If it makes you feel better, it wasn't even fun and was overall underwhelming; whether it's a bot or a human, it was super easy to figure it out, it was incredibly easy to confuse the bot and make it not respond, leading to around 40 seconds of time wasted, and it's rare to find a fellow human. My score (if I were to give it one) would be negative anyway.

However, I recently found out that, as stated in their own Terms of Use page (that link is to a Twitter thread with a bit more information on the matter) that it is an Israel-based website, and they openly support Israel. On top of that, they share personal data collected from the website to third parties who can sell the data. I'll be honest, I don't really understand all the ins and outs of it, but I do know that I don't want my time playing a silly game in any way contributing to ongoing ethnic cleansing, inadvertently supporting the government directly responsible, and allowing them to share and sell my personal information.

Consider this a PSA to avoid this game and site. Do your clicks, support the people of Palestine, and FREE PALESTINE

Today is my birthday! And for such an occasion, me and my bestie are playing through the Ace Attorney trilogy, in what is the first revisit I've had to the original games since I was a child

Anyone who knows me knows the importance the AA trilogy had in my early years. As an adult, I'm somewhat forced to view the game in a different manner, but I can also now look back to see the purpose this held to me, in the past. To be a child in the western world is to be ignored, I think. Especially a child like me who could understand these things more than most. Adults play little lords who can offer no refuge from the agony they bring, purposeful or not. It always seemed to me that everyone was making base mistakes that I could never fathom, that reflected off them and burned into me because children have no say in anything that goes on around them. And I could never understand their actions- I could never understand the screaming, I could never understand the deeply ingrained violence, I never understood why no one listened or could even parse things that were immediately obvious to me. Or why no one felt spurred to change. For years, I just ghosted the world feeling like one big tear all the time, very alone, but I would rather be alone than be with people like that. But I never forgot it, the extreme frustration of being that child. The child who is forced into situations with no voice and no autonomy, getting punished when I myself could not say anything back, lashing out and being unable to convey my desperation. Its pure bile and anger to be there.

I had so many feelings and thoughts about this growing up, the above can only be a tame simplification of many years of displacement. But one day, I caught a glimpse of a weird lawyer game on my shitty little ipod's app store in 2013, and things kind of changed. As I played, suddenly, I could see what it was like to have a voice. I could see what it was like to have friends, to find a family. I was introduced to a manner of things through Ace Attorney, a new manner of thought even, which at the time felt very cathartic to me. It reinforced a conviction that I've held since I could remember and I could see myself a little in it, sometimes. It was a comforting space. As an adult who knows more about the world than I did then, the writing isnt so mind-blowingly fantastic. But boy, as a child was it sure fucking incredible. To shout your objections and have pure, undeniable proof of what you meant at terrible people who otherwise would never see it. It was the spark of that more than the actual meat of it.

As for this game itself, it's more about what it did for me rather than what it is. To encourage thinking for ones self, to encourage that faith in an informed conviction. And that which fueled my fire for creative work, that I am still drawimg today. I talked about this a lot in my aai2 review, and I will talk about it again, but the introduction of Miles Edgeworth resonated with me so much back then. Who doesnt want to watch their shitty father bash their head into a wall- but that meant so much to me then. Actually, I forgot that this character largely introduced the concept of homosexuality to me. I would have figured myself out sooner or later, as I would with all these things, but at the very least I finished this game back then with an appreciation for a masculine demeanor and a strong need for a fitted suit.

I'm kind of rambling, and not well, but its my birthday so I'm allowed to. In present times, I'm noticing many spelling errors and sometimes a lacking of tone. And sometimes I feel like it relies too much on a joke so that the whole thing comes off as clowny, but I also feel like it might just be the english translation that made things this way. This was the first of its kind after all, and I've seen how the series has grown, so I can cut it some slack. Turnabout Goodbyes and Rise from the Ashes are still fantastic cases, and what's been even more fun than running down memory lane is watching my best friend experiencing it with me for the first time. I cant explain how much I absolutely love every piece of these games, though. They feel like a part of me, and I'm fairly proud of that. Its been a blast, and I cant wait to rediscover the rest of the series again.


Dont forget DL-6!

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