Alastor

I tried a PS2 game called Robotic Alchemical Drive last night because of a funny video I saw about it, and I had to see if it was actually good or a 'so bad it's good' game.

I only did one mission but I like it a lot! The mech combat is one of the most interesting/coolest ideas I've seen in a game, basically you don't control the mech, you control your character controlling the mech. You switch from moving the character and moving the mech but your viewpoint of the action will always be what your character on the ground can see, hence you're swapping between the two as you send a kaiju or or a kaiju sends you flying and you need to run across the street to see what's happening, later on I'm told you get a jetpack and you can basically fly to rooftops or even the shoulder of the mech itself, increasing visibility but at the cost of constant danger of being flattened by either your mech or the kaiju falling on you or your mech getting sent flying with you undocked on it's shoulder. I'm pretty sure this makes it the only second person view game I've ever played? How many games are there like that?

The mech controls are different too, and probably somewhat intentionally clunky(?) to simulate the potential complexity of you controlling a 60 foot mech, you use the shoulder buttons to control your legs (Press L2/R2 alternately to walk!) and the analogs to punch, as in to hook you do a 90 degree outwards slide to hook or a down-up snap to uppercut. This made my first Kaiju fight look like a drunken brawl between two giant robots but I can't deny it's fun to ragdoll things with an uppercut.

Finally, the whole thing has absolutely atrocious voice acting…and I love it. There's a character called Nanao who basically represents the average citizen in a world where your city is trampled in a mech fight every now and then and her struggle to simply get a job that last more than a week (You can accidentally destroy her current workplace, making her jobless) and it's hard to not root for her with how her VA just goes super dramatic about it. I heard it was made by the same people who made EDF, if that helps you picture the spirit of the thing somewhat? Not that I've played EDF. (yes, I know )

Trails Beyond the Horizon is out and as such I am 60 hours in and I'm probably…halfway through, I can confidently say this is still better than Daybreak 2 but man it has pacing and bloat issues, not helped by playing back to back pretty much with Trails 1st which is the probably better game, but specifically has a better structure and pacing.

I still think the elimation race or whatever it's called is really fucking good and the tracks we got are pretty cool too, seeing how people are parkour-ing around them on a Kart on youtube also has me appreciating the design a bit more too, but I think I'll wait til' a few more updates before dipping back in. I think the best thing I can say about this is after the hype of the new Sonic Kart game and people telling me the last one was better than MK, with all my issues with MKW I still think I preferred it to CrossWorlds, the physics and the weighty feel of the Karts is still really good. (might come across as faint praise perhaps)

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.

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.