are you using your time to properly think and talk with art? are you listening? or do you plug your ears anytime it tries to talk with you, to challenge you and make you rethink what you're engaging with?

i don't think i have any common ground with most people who like videogames, actually. but i don't think this is just videogames anymore, this is endemic in all of the arts. people stopped being listeners, started being consumers. no long a plot twist will make your heart skip a beat, now it's the author "betraying" your trust. no longer can complicated concept be presented before your public, now you're "fumbling", "overdesigning" or whatever new word people will invent to use as analytical shortcuts. like, really, you spent 90h with this game and all you could get back from it was that it has "Ubisoft-like" design because it has towers? i don't care if you gave the game 4 or 5 stars or if that was a compliment, is it that hard to think more about it? am i setting the bar too high? probably.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is not a product, it's an art piece which you converse with (that's honestly 99.9% of games too btw). hefty admission price for sure, but it does not need to cater to you at any moment. it needs to be heard, seen, felt, I think running around the grasslands felt incredible and vibrant, i love how every map changes its whole design based on the chocobos, i love how sidequests have their own little songs to them with battle music included, i love how every character gets explored a whole ton more because now they have the time to do so, I love how Tifa can be herself instead of Cloud's past, I liked every change, I think this game is probably one of the most courageous games ever made and that will ever be made and people won't appreciate it enough, but that's fine because I will.

the more i think about it, the more i think about its last hours, the more i think how they handled -that moment- the more I like it. I like this and Remake for entirely different reasons, but Rebirth made me feel things I don't think i was even aware I could feel playing a game and I don't mean crying i cry for everything and i cried super hard at several moments in this game, it's something else, which i would only dare to explain if I had spoilered this text but i don't want to do so.

like i said i think i finally realized my lack of common ground is what makes it really hard to talk about videogames outside of my circle, people who only wear "videogames are art!!" as a mantle for feeling validated, but not really treating them much differently than the hamburger they'll buy for lunch. i don't mind if you didn't like the game but i only ask for something of substance, an interesting read, at the very least a personal perspective, not internet gaming buzzwords i can see in like 60 other reviews. i just want to think and challenge myself and i feel like i'm always going into a hivemind. but i guess that's fine i get to cherish good things when i see them at least.

i just need to remind myself of this

Theres this random ass bridge in ishgard I noticed that really sucks. Its between the airship landing and the main artery in the middle of the pillars. If you look at it for too long it is a stupid bridge. Its made of two arches, and instead of there being a support pillar being between the arches, there's two supports placed in the middle of the arches?? and between the arches is a massive pillar for holding a lantern, putting the most stress on the least structurally stable part of the bridge. Absolutely braindead structure, I dont know how ishgard stood for this long. But then when you go over the bridge its looks really good and honestly the way the support beams look is pretty cool. The vista going over it is outstanding.
I could turn this into a metaphor for heavensward itself but honestly its about the bridge. Have you seen it? its really funny

people like to throw around the word "pretentious" when talking about things that they don't like, but i don't think that they Actually know what it means. when we, as people, describe something as pretentious, we mean that it is attempting to peacock as though it is more intelligent or significant than it actually is.

well, buddy, look no further than this game for that definition. a game whose gameplay is worse in nearly every way than its predecessors, one that makes grand gesticulations towards the ideas of "racism" and "american exceptionalism" only to fall flat on its face every step of the way, and possessive of a "twist" so meaningless in the context of the plot that acts merely as a smokescreen to quickly make its escape as it hopes players will walk away unable to remember anything else about the game.

if there were a poll online for "The Most Pretentious Game of All Time", i would bet money on the collective reddit-esque hive mind of "gamers" choosing something like Braid. well Bioshock Infinite, you've got my vote, friendo!

This is the best roguelike In have ever played and I enjoy it every single time I pick it up; that being said I utterly despise this game and hate every second of it.

I have had runs where I feel more powerful than any game has ever made me feel, only to die to the single dumbest thing I have ever experienced. This game will straight up just kill you in like 80% of your runs, and it will feel terrible and you will be furious. Then you'll boot the game back up five minutes later because this game will put a strangle-hold on you like nothing else.

It's completely uncanny how something this dense and obtuse and infuriating can be so addictive and fun(?). It very much feels like a game that was not designed with the idea of being played in mind, and everything in it will act accordingly. It's a very impersonal kind of difficulty; Noita does not care if you beat it, shelve it, or rinse it for every secret it has. None of that has anything to do with how much you are rewarded or punished, it will simply act how it is irrespective of any sort of sense of progression or design, and that is fascinating.

It's one of those rare games that feels like it never stops getting bigger and deeper the more you play it, and the sense of discovery just never really slows down. The main path of this game seems to be a fraction of it's full world, but exploring that outer world is so difficult to pull off that any new thing you find there feels like a major discovery. It's the kind of design that inspires communities of secret hunters and lore gatherers to try to make sense of it all.

It almost feels like I haven't played enough of it to review it despite "beating" the game in a sense, but I get the feeling that I will always feel like that to some degree. I don't think I'll ever truly complete Noita, and that's really something special.

Even being Capcom's best-selling game ever, even with the widespread critical acclaim and obscene popularity, I still truly believe that Monster Hunter: World & Iceborne comprise an incredibly underrated and underappreciated game. Skill Up, a YouTube critic whose opinion I respect a lot called it "one of the best games ever made" and it's incredibly refreshing to see that because I don't think enough people are willing to make such a statement about Monster Hunter: World, I am another of those who is.

I think when you have a franchise that has a new game coming out every 3 or 4 years it's hard to really bask in the quality of any individual release. You often talk about the games in relation to eachother and think about how good they are compared to others in the series and don't hold them up against other games as a whole. A similar thing I think happens to Pokemon, for example. Generations 2-5 of Pokemon consist of some of the most popular and enjoyable JRPGs ever released, yet no one's ever willing to talk about how Pokemon Emerald or Pokemon Black/White 2 are some of the best games of all time because they're too swept up in the discourse of whatever else new is happening in the series, and comparing them to that.

But no, man. Even with Rise having released since, the more I think about it since the dust has settled the more I truly believe that Monster Hunter World & Iceborne deserve to be held up in even higher regard than they are. We need to really step back and look at not just how good this game is in the context of the series, but when held up against other games of its time. This game came out in 2018, over 4 years ago as I'm writing this review. Isn't that insane? It feels like you could release it today in 2022 and it would still be absolutely astounding in terms of presentation, in terms of quality-of-life changes and in terms of sheer memorability.

Context is important, so for a second I am gonna quickly compare this to another game in the series, ironically. Look at Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate from 2014, and look at just how dramatically this game improves upon that (already fantastic game) in less than 4 years. Gorgeous and sprawling interconnected maps with no loading screens, scoutflies eliminating the need to throw paintballs at monsters to track them, moving whilst using items, being able to physically see a monster you've just captured back at base camp after you've done so. There are countless quality-of-life changes and gorgeous little touches of artistry that make this game so fundamentally immersive and enchanting to play. World's maps truly are alive and so dense, you could get lost in them for hours just exploring and taking in all the endemic life and visual setpieces in all their little nooks and crannies.

And no, those maps may not always be perfectly suited for combat as a result (here's looking at you, Ancient Forest) and the game may be too RNG-heavy in its endgame, but these trade-offs are absolutely palatable in my opinion when you consider just how many things this game does right. Combat is still fundamentally so much fun, armour design is consistently incredible even if weapon design is lacking (which is markedly improved in Iceborne anyway) and the game perfectly paces its feedback loop by giving the player the most resplendent and relaxing (and customisable!) player home yet.

This game has given me so many memorable moments. Even with 4 years and a whole new game after it, I still think about my first time encountering Namielle and that unbelievable final boss fight of Iceborne all the time. A modern fucking classic, old school elitists be damned.