New Year, New thread, New Me, New Games, New Lease on Life I hope!
Shinobi Art of Vengeance
This is an absolutely stunning looking game with fun combat but if I'm honest, I really started to dislike how damn long some levels were. If they were more compact, you'd still have the fun platforming and combat but they'd be closer together and not spaced by a bit of wondering about like a semi-metroidvania, something I'm not sure enhanced this game for me at all.
And as fun as combat is, it's pretty damn easy to the point of being pretty unengaging after a while, and why engage when the game design has you revisiting old maps with new powers and thus you can basically not fight them anyway? And the bosses were fun in the moment but they all blended into each other because of the low difficulty.
In short, the demo had me thinking this was a 10 but it's more like a 7 or 8, maybe Ragebound is the superior 2D Ninja sidescroller eh? AoV isn't bad, but I beat the PS2 Shinobi a few months ago and it was never boring the way this could be. I still have more stuff to do, it is a (sort of) Metroidvania after all but I'm not sure if I can bring myself to do it, the Goro Majima and Eggman DLC? Now that has me intrigued.
Starting off strong with, erm, Arkham Asylum (which I already played years ago on… PS3?). There was a ridiculous sale on this and the Arkham City remasters at the end of last year, which seemed rude to refuse. It was much shorter than I remembered, and the character designs have aged like milk, but getting that combo flow in combat is still chef's kiss.
Stupid amounts of stuff still left in it—the challenge maps, a little under half of the Riddler stuff—but I think I'll probably leave it there and give City a go next.
Shinobi: Art of Vengeance
Azure Striker Gunvolt
I wish I liked this more than I do, it's from the people who made the Mega Man Zero games and I really like the designs for this game so I bought the Trilogy pack on a sale a while ago and…not really sure I like it, the gameplay mechanic of tagging enemies so you can zap them boild down to you shooting things then holding a button to watch them die, I'm not sure how this is more fun than just shooting them like Mega Man or slicing them like Zero.
If the sequel isn't looking any better, I'm out.
A little too much bible/religion in it for me (just a few overtones, but I think it would've been better without it) but a small completion of "…and Roger" a 90 minute game that I'd recommend playing totally blind if you can.
Without giving too much away it has stuff that resonated a lot with me and there were bits I was genuinely quite teary. YMMV, of course, as it depends on whether you've faced issues like those in the game. I has a few similarities with other emotive games in whatever we're calling this genre now (point and click and FEEL THINGS?) but it's very much its own thing. Is it as good as Florence? (the game, not Rab) - I'd say not, but it's not far off.
Final Fantasy VII Remake
I thought this was superb. A really ambitious remake that expands on everything the original offered while still giving fans something new to think about. In particular the characters are much more effectively depicted here (especially Aerith - although Cloud is still a stroppy dullard) and the combat system does a good job of making them feel significantly different.
It does have a few pacing problems, but I guess that's not surprising given that it effectively expands a 5-hour intro sequence from the original into a full 40-hour game. The first half (up to and including Wall Market, I'd say) is mostly pretty great, but the back half suffers a bit with some very long "dungeon" sequences and a final section that just keeps going… and going… and going.
The ending is decidedly weird. Deliberately obtuse, even. It's never really clear where Sephiroth fits into things (I get that he's been retrofitted into this segment of the game from the original) and while he's clearly looking to manipulate timelines and mess about with stuff, I don't know why that suddenly makes him the party's enemy number one. There's a new guy called Zack who shows up with no explanation, right at the end. Jenova appears, gets smacked down and never properly explained. It's not clear where the party is going at the end of the game. But I'm sure this will all get further explained in the next game, or maybe in the new INTERmission segment that I've still got to play.
The last few hours of Remake are a pretty big diversion from where the PS1 game goes at that part, I really didn't like having the rug pulled from under me to be honest, which at the time put me in a minority opinion, but once that cat was out of the bag it made me a lot more fine with what it was doing, I still wish it didn't do that but it is what it is.
Rebirth is one of the best RPGs on the PS5 but it is VERY big, much bigger than Remake. People wondered if they were going to make the open world simplified or menu based or something and it turns out, they were just going to give us all of it (well, Disk 2 at least) and fill it with Yakuza levels of minigames. I think it's (mostly) GOOD content, more character development and stuff, but it definitely burned me out. I really hope Part 3 scales things back a bit.
I didn't gel with Rebirth at all the way I did with Remake. It's got some stuff in it that ranges from just kind of zany, to stuff that's borderline upsetting in a mostly-realistic art style (I wouldn't feel safe in a room with any real person who'd willingly stay in the Gold Saucer hotel). Wild tonal inconsistency seems to be part of the "charm" of a lot of JRPGs, but I found it distracting at best, and actively offputting at worst.
There's a bordering-on-Ubisoft amount of side crap, almost none of which is particularly compelling. I got fed up, dropped it onto Easy, and just mainlined it to the end of the plot from the middle of Spoiler - click to showCosmo Canyon. It's a shame, because some of the plot stuff it does is quite interesting, but it chickens out of the bravest decision it looked like it was going to make. It's still not quite clear by the end exactly what Sephiroth is doing, or why it must be STOPPED AT ALL COSTS.
I'll almost certainly play part 3 just to see the project through, but given how much goodwill I went into Rebirth with, I was ultimately pretty disappointed.
Yeah I really didn't get on with Rebirth. It could have been wonderful, but there's so much friction everywhere. I gave up on one of the awful chocobo stealth sections, after the fifth time of trying.
The chocobos are maybe the worst-implemented thing in it. Types are region-locked, there's no capture or breeding minigame, and the racing isn't even fun.
I thought the chocobo stealth sections in each region were super tedious, but I really enjoyed the racing game, drifting was fun af. Honestly I enjoy most of the minigames, I get why people might not like them, especially Queen's Blade but I loved that and the Fort Condor minigame a lot. 
A big issue with Rebirth is how it sets itself up to be so formulaic, once you've done one region you know exactly what you're doing in the next one, so if you hated the Chocobos and the 'Investigate the Eikons' stuff you got that to look forward to every new Zone, even in the Zones themselves there's a pattern.
Ocarina of Time 3DS
I enjoyed this, but I'm not sure I actually recommend it these days. It's just so empty and despite it being an early pioneer of 3D open worlds, your path through the game is pretty set. Still, I did have fun with it and it was interesting comparing it to Breath of The Wild.
Final Fantasy Remake - INTERmission
Went back to this to play the extra Yuffie chapter you get on the newer versions of the game. It's fun enough, more substantial than I'd expected but that's mostly because it's padded out with minigames (including a fun Tower Defence thing that I spent far too much time on). Yuffie herself is annoying as shit and the guy she's paired with for this is a generic Final Fantasy plank that we'll never see again, but as an extra little bonus it's actually pretty good and you get some extra cutscenes at the end that follow the main party's path a bit further.
I wasn't planning to go straight into Rebirth but I'm actually quite keen to do so now - assuming that is that I can get it running well enough on the Steam Deck. Remake ran great but I'm not expecting the same from the sequel.
Yuffie is baffling because every character in the game has great work done in fleshing them out a bit more but aside from maybe a few scenes Yuffie still won't shut the fuck up about Materia
Her gameplay is fucking peak, though.
True, I didn't play Interlude but I hear she was somewhat of an outlier in how obviously more deep she was to the rest of the cast of Remake specifically and in Rebirth she has tons of heavy hitting tricks (I'm still a fan of Tank Red XIII spin2winning everyone into his limit break though)
Shinobi: Art of Vengeance
Azure Striker Gunvolt
Trails beyond the Horizon - Such a massive bounce back from the last game, sadly this feels like the most bloated game in the series, some of the pacing issues are incredibly frustrating, but when it finally decides to do something it has the juiciest events in the series by far, it practically redefines the scale of everything to a pointwhere replaying the older games has a 'the whole time huh?' hanging over it, but in a good way. If they had cut the bloat the good moments of this game would be closer together and bridged by the best combat in the series to date, making the game probably Top 3 status for me.
As a game/RPG it isn't as good as Trails in the Sky 1st, as a Trails/Kiseki game this is still really good.
Shinobi: Art of Vengeance
Azure Striker Gunvolt
Trails beyond the Horizon
We Love Katamari - as I said in the PWB thread, a 10/10 game that endlessly puts the concept of rolling a sticky ball over random shit alongside an absolutely wonderful OST through a fun and unique lens that changes your objective per level. Said this about a few games now but I really haven't got a bad word to say about this. I think I still have more content to do but I'll leave the rest to be played another day on Steam's version, I definitely rolled up the Sun though so it still counts as a win
