crispy4000

Time Spent: ~45 min Rating: **** Yup, this is everything I hoped it would be. It's frenetic, doesn't feel unfair, and lets you retry rooms until you've completed them. Looks super stylish with lots of bloom, warping and pixel shading effects. I wasn't expecting story bits in between missions, but they're welcome diversions from the action. Play it, it's awesome, one of the easiest recommendations so far.

Time Spent: ~10 min Rating: *½ Beat 'em up sidescroller. Enemies give you pickups when killed that either serve as your health bar (Sonic rings style) or can be redeemed towards special moves, which feels like bad design to me. Movement is a bit janky in its looseness, which equally applies to an automatic double jump if you hold jump. The pixel art isn't awful, but is still far too zoomed in for this type of game. Music is trash. It's trying to be a better game, which reminds me, I should play Katana Zero next.

Time Spent: 1 hour Rating: ** I've tried to get into this one two or three times now. It's probably just not for me. Choose your own adventure style game with a few more RPG systems. It gives me flashbacks to how much I disliked Banner Saga's choice system, at least on the surface. Maybe there's a good game here, but I generally don't like being punished for making choices out of arbitrary selections. Add to that a text centric presentation, and it's really not my cup of tea. Well reviewed though, so more power to you if you can get into it.

I might give Oxenfree 2 and Poinpy a shot one day. See Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon and TMNT are up there too.

Time Spent: 45 minutes Rating: ***½ Good combat mechanics and an interesting setting where all the NPCs and your character can run out of juice, and presumably die. There is a stamina meter, but you can upgrade it to not go down when you run, which seems like a smart upgrade considering the game timer. The only downside so far is that the visuals are a bit lackluster. I dislike pixelated dithered effects in games today, they're totally unnessicary, especially when it's using bloom and such anyways. Jack Move is a better looking game with a similar aesthetic. Anyone who enjoyed this would do well to check that game out too.

Time Spent: 40 minutes Rating: ***½ Back to this thread after some time away wrapping up FF7 Rebirth. ScourgeBringer feels like you're a pissed off wasp dashing through the air stinging the shit out of everything. Enemies don't hurt you on contact, only when attacking you directly, so you can go ham most of the time. I just question the balance. Your gun's ammo is really sparse, and the persistent upgrades are nice but you'll be doing lots of runs. And as cool as it is that heavy metal kicks in when you're wrecking stuff, the visual presentation is a bit too sparse for my taste. Still, it’s a thrill.

What’s that Steampunk FPS again? I’d like to see more of that.

First month I accidentally didn’t pause Humble Choice. Oh well.

One of the must play JRPGs of the past decade or two. In Remake, you get to revisit many of the same places in FF7 creatively reimagined. But with Rebirth they had almost a blank canvas since the PS1 game's overworld is very sparse. FF7 Rebirth realizes it as something closer to a Xenoblade game, with more unique traversal abilities and less high level monsters roaming around to destroy you. That ends up working out quite well, it makes the game feel nice and breezy. There are Ubisoft like towers and map markers, but the only interactions actions that truly felt like busywork to me were the combat challenges and some of the mini-games. Whether you enjoy the mini-games or not depends on your taste, but they'll seldom be a wall to your progress if you're not a completionist. Pacing is one of the game's strong suits. I can't think of another open world game that throws you new mechanics (and mini-games) so frequently. But that also doesn't leave much time for any one particular thing to be fleshed out outside of the card game, Queen's Blood. The game's excellent combat system makes up for that fact. Having more characters to play with than Remake makes a big difference, as does a greatly simplified weapon leveling system. The amount of side quests is also perfect. And the linear bits impressively feel like nothing was scaled back or undercooked. As far as respecting the legacy while also giving fans something new, it walks a tight line but mostly succeeds. The things that made the ending of Remake controversial will remain controversial here, even though their impact on the through-line as we know it is debatable. I could see some of the other twists and additions getting on the nerves of some purists. But ultimately, they're all in character, and maybe even better considered than the original in terms of consistency. It does soften the impact of certain scenes and spoils a bit of what's next, especially with THAT scene, so playing through the original first is still recommended. Rebirth can't help spoiling the things fans of FF7 would already know, sometimes needlessly. What could make the game even better? An honest to goodness jump button akin to Xenoblade X. The climbing is pretty janky here, and I just want the freedom to bounce around without the game blocking me from climbing something. 9.5/10 2024 Games Final Fantasy XVI - 8.5/10 Tinykin - 8/10 Evan's Remains - 7.5/10 Crisis Core Final Fantasy VII: Reunion - 7/10 Castle of Illusion Remake - 7.5/10 FF7R Episode Intermission - 8.5/10 Telsagrad 2 - 7.5/10 Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth - 9.5/10

You’ll be fine. Once you beat it, go back and watch the big moment in question in the original.

Rolled credits, fantastic game. It's been a long time since I played og FF7. The feelings of loss and hopelessness in Rebirth definitely don't hit quite as hard. Rebirth realizes that it can't live up to the first time the story is told, so takes things in a different direction to flesh out these events, but in doing so spoils where og FF7 goes later. It's realistic to what most of us know about these characters, and doesn’t feel cheap as a result. So long as you can understand most of the split universe stuff as sort of a side note. (for now?) There are some interesting wrinkles left, particularly: I'd still recommend playing and finish the OG before you get to the final chapters of this game. The og hits harder, Rebirth instead softens it by fleshing out the context, both with new additions and references to future events. Oh, and Intergrade DLC is recommended as well. There's a few sequences with Yuffie in Rebirth that won't land at all if you haven't played it. Whereas you can still enjoy Rebirth fine enough if you've only played remake (though og FF7's impact will be dampened).

None of that was known when the 360 launched. Microsoft got in front, it would have paid off regardless. I don’t think another 360 gen would come easy, but they could do it if they leveraged their assets in a meaningful way in a launch year. Come out swinging, instead of deflated. It sets the narrative. It could also be argued that their new multiplatform push would make people hesitant to buy their machine regardless. So they’re sort of keeping themselves in this position. Games Pass and Series S were both great illustrations that the value play doesn’t drive hardware sales. They focused on the wrong things. And their one big software bet, Halo Infinite, generated a bunch of question marks with a delay instead of earnest hype.

Couple counterpoints to this: The 360 went first and it ended up working out fine for Microsoft. The games industry fought the idea of generational shifts hard this time with an extended cross-gen period. I don’t expect that to change going forward. Instead we’d see an Xbox Next use graphical options designed for PC builds. And it’s indies who are having a harder time justifying Xbox ports. Not the EA, Ubisofts and such. Things are still far from Wii U bad.

Let’s go with Mario Wonder then. Was what I wanted for the holidays and didn’t get. Digital works!

Awesome! I’ll have to think on it a bit. 180 from this thread… I want a new fun game to play in front of my young daughter. Debating between Kirby and the Forogtten Land and Mario Wonder. @stepee any thoughts? Either that or I go with PoP Lost Crown.

Hey, they gotta do something for the divorced 40 year olds.

It’s got it all. Girls in bikinis is stock for their key art. I think people have an oddly selective memory about this franchise. You know, thank goodness we don’t get games like Duke Nukem 3D anymore, but never mind the franchise where you can fuck then shoot the scantily clad women. If they brought back ‘hot coffee’ today, I’m not sure people would make such a deal of it anymore. Sexualization in Western games may not always be as visual, but it’s still become more gameified than when the industry was targeting male teenagers. The cringe is still there, it’s just a different flavor now.

GTA. That was a layup.

Orcs Must Die 3 next week on Epic.

78 Why are we closing bank accounts again?

That (first?) temple boss is no joke. Really nice to see you can't just cheese through the game by doing most of the side quests.

Kinda? They had things to criticize, but no cohesive argument about what a game's 'soul' is and why this lacks it. Which is what that criticism invites. It's still not a good sign. These reviews in general remind me of Yooka-Laylee's. Reviewers had a hard time pinpointing what made it worse than Banjo, so they often resorted to that line to get the point across. Or the even lazier criticism of 3d platformers never being that good to begin with.

The RPGamer one I read first basically said that its fine? … but had no soul.

Man the reviews on this have been so harsh. I'm not the biggest fan of this series, only having played a bit of the first. But still, I hope its still an enjoyable time.

The final battle gauntlet you unlock in the Gold Saucer is absurd. Definitely an endgame activity. And here I was thinking I'd 100% all the quests before the end.