- Pronouns
- He/Him
FFXVI praise is music to my ears1. Desperados III [ PC ] - 9
2. Ace Attorney Investigations: Prosecutor's Path ( Replay ) [ DS*] - 10
3. Resident Evil Deadly Silence [ DS*] - 8.5
4. Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney ( Replay ) [ 3DS ] - 8.5
5. Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box [ DS ] - 6
6. Professor Layton and the Unwound Future [ DS ] - 6
7. Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies ( Replay ) [ 3DS ] - 9
8. Koumajou Remilia: Scarlet Symphony [ NS ] - 7
9. Gargoyle's Quest [ GB ] - 7.5
10. Ace Attorney Investigations ( Replay ) [ DS ] - 9
Capcom Arcade Stadium 1 & 2 [ NS ]
11. Cyberbots: Fullmetal Madness - 7.5
13. Giga Wing - 7
14. Progear - 8
15. Eco Fighters - 8.5
16. Darkstalkers The Night Warriors - 5
12. Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride [ DS*] - 10
17. Signalis [ NS ] - 10 - 2 playthroughs
18. Ace Attorney: Apollo Justice ( Replay ) [ 3DS ] - 6 - 3rd playthrough, first time on the 3DS
19. Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice ( Replay ) [ 3DS ] - 10
20. Ace Attorney ( Replay ) [ DS ] - 10 - This is probably my 6th or 7th playthrough overall
21. Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon [ NS ] - 9
22. Final Fight 2 [ SNES* ] - 7
23. Final Fight 3 [ SNES* ] - 8
24. Metroid Prime ( Replay ) [ NS ] - 10 - First Switch playthrough
25. Resident Evil 4 (2005) ( Replay ) [ Wii ] - 9
26. Viewtiful Joe ( Replay ) [ GC ] - 10
27. Viewtiful Joe 2 ( Replay ) [ GC ] - 10
28. Advance Wars [ NS ] - 9
29. Doom (1993) [ NS ] - 8
30. Hi-Fi Rush [ PC ] - 5
31. Strider 2 [ PS1 ] - 6
32. Kirby's Return to Dreamland ( Replay ) [ NS ] - 10 - First Switch playthrough
33. Demon Souls [ PS3 ]
34. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom [ NS ] - 6
35. Mass Effect [ PC ]
36. Last Command [ NS ] - 8
37. Mohism: Battle of Words [ PC ] - 7.5
38. The Chrono Jotter [ PC ] - 10
39. Valis IV [ PC-Engine ] - 7
40. missed messages. [ PC ] - 7
41. Pikmin 3 ( Replay ) [ NS ] - 10 - First Switch playthrough, 5th overall.
42. Eternal Darkness [ GC ] - 8.5
43. Pikmin 4 [ NS ] - 5
44. Professor Layton and the Last Specter [ DS ] - 9
45. Fear the Spotlight [ PC ] - 7
46. Life is Strage Remastered ( Replay ) [ PC ] - 7
47. 3D Classics: Kid Icarus [ 3DS ] - 7
48. Super Mario Bros. Wonder [ NS ] - 9
49. Resident Evil 4 (2023) [ PC ] - 10
50. Eigengrau [ NS ] - 9
51. Disney's The Little Mermaid [ *NES ] - 7
Fun short and sweet side scroller with a what if scenario of the Little Mermaid, with an appropiate visual style and music that sounds fitting for the movie it represents. They lovingly recreated the whole Under the Sea song in 8 bit as the title screen theme, I don't know how much they actually liked these movies, but Capcom always made sure to make a good game out of them plus shows like Goof Troop and Ducktales, and also added really good original soundtracks and amazing arrangements, and one so good that it became part of a reboot show years later.
*35. Mass Effect (Legendary Edition) ( Replay ) [ PC ] - 10
The first Mass Effect game benefits the most from the Legendary Edition release by polishing up a lot of the jank in terms of controls from both the characters and the Mako vehicle while retaining its equipment and level up mechanics, which elevates a great game to pretty much a masterpiece to me, with its overall great narrative that ties well your alien companions, their goals and motivations and how you behave with them into the main storyline, alongside its great world and presentation.
52. Mass Effect 2 (Legendary Edition) [ PC ] - 9
While a lot less focused than the first game in its story, and I don't find the survey system a good replacement for the Mako exploration of the first game (like it's fun at first but it takes a while going through every planet launching probes to harvest all that material over time and is not the most engaging thing in the world), Mass Effect 2 makes up for it with a genuinely great cast of characters, just like the first game the alien companions are the highlight and are allowed to be more nuanced and interesting on their own as characters since all the work of establishing their culture was mostly set by the first game, and the core of the gameplay with building up your ship and loyalty with them does end up tying itself nicely into the story by the finale. The combat is a lot more like a TPS of the time, I didn't mind the shift that much since it ended up being pretty solid despite some more annoying enemy encounters.
53. Final Fantasy XVI [ PS5 ] - 10
XVI is the latest controversial title in the long running Final Fantasy franchise, handled by Creative Business Unit III, the side of Square in charge of the Online FF titles and with merging from the division that handled the Dragon Quest Builders games, little what I played of XI was pretty cool tho something where one clearly needs a more active group of people to get the most out of it, and I'm overall a pretty big fan of XIV, even with some lows in its story and gameplay, is something I remain pretty engaged with and I'm looking forward to Dawntrail.
My excitement from the game was something that grew out of my experience with XIV and the key people involved with the game.
For the most part action based gameplay isn't something I find Square to be good at by themselves, Mana is solid enough and that is the best example they have without resorting to studios like Platinum or Koei. For XVI however they brought Ryota Susuki, a Capcom guy which is a company great at that, so much that every IP of them at some point just ends up being an action title, I'm waiting for that to happen to Ace Attorney. So for this game I could have some level of confidence that they'll pull off the gameplay well.
Kazutoyo Maehiro acts as creative director and scenario writer, the main scenario writer for A Realm Reborn and Heavensward in FFXIV, Heavensward remains for me the whole company's peak in terms of narrative, extremely well focused on its themes and progression with a great cast of characters, even its leadups to Stormblood and Shadowbringers were incredibly well done. So I had a good amount of confidence that the game would deliver on story as well.
Hiroshi Minagawa and Kazuya Takahashi as Art Director and Character Design respectively, mixing people that worked in Tactics, XII, XI and both in XIV, those games are my ideal way of how Final Fantasy should look, a fairly unpopular take I would have around here is that looking at XVI it definitely feels to me like a sensible transition from a game like VI in a modern 3D. Could also look at it as next gen XIV. Either way it looked great and finally being able to play it and see all its characters and locations, yep, I love the look of it.
Masayoshi Soken is the main composer of the game and given all the tracks I loved from XIV I was definitely pretty excited to hear more of his work, his way of making extremely memorable motifs for locations and characters would serve well to elevate the score of XVI, and his general proficiency with different music genres. Also loved the way he uses Prelude and the Theme of Final Fantasy across several tracks in XIV.
Also due praise to Koji Fox, XIV from Heavensward and onwards being an exception to me with Square of making a really good effort with the english localization and voice cast, also brought for XVI.
And of course Naoki Yoshida, head of the division, director and producer of XIV, producer of XVI and a Dragon Quest guy.
A stacked set of key people that would certainly deliver on a great game, and boy what a game.
While the story wasn't as constant peak as Heavensward imo, and while I wasn't initially sold on certain story shifts, it ended up winning me over on pretty much all narrative threads. The more what I would call trademarked Final Fantasy BS turns is well foreshadowed in advance and twists weren't treated as anything grand but rather slowly unveiled, almost giving it a Tales of esque quality to some of them, which hey, I won't complain about that. What serves best the story and themes is the amazing cast of characters, it has a been a while since I liked pretty much every major and even minor character presented in a game between its main and side scenarios, was impressed with how much I ended up being attached to all of them, Clive is a fantastic protagonist and eternal good boi, a peak Cid, I'm glad Jill isn't perpetually horny for Clive and is a great character on her own and ended up finding their relationship extremely sweet, Dion is so good even with his relatively short screentime that he could be another peak main character in a different game, Gav? Mid? Byron? Love them, added to that are a lot of consistently entertaining and interesting antagonists as well.
Don't have much else to say about the visual aspect, it looks beautiful, I adore the character design and art direction, and the design of the Summons/Eikons are fantastic, my favorite Shiva. The music, oh man, Soken. He definitely went with a more cinematic flair than in his XIV work, but it worked so well regardless. The locales tracks, open areas and calm "dungeon" themes have more of an ambiance style to them, but still have well recognizable and memorable motifs to tie them all together, he has a heavier use of the Prelude and Theme of Final Fantasy in this game and its all pretty well done, when it hits in some boss themes or tracks like Final Farewells, chef kiss. And the battle themes, he went all out on them, the Eikon fight themes rival the best of XIV and the entire series, and Ascension is without a doubt his Dancing Mad moment, what a tremendous track for arguably the game's best sequence. The character motifs/themes are also some of Soken's best pieces, Find the Flame for Clive, My Star and all its arrangements for Jill.
Gameplay is really good, the combat system isn't perfect and I have certain preferences for how abilities and the camera works that clashes with XVI, but is still a net positive in my engagement and enjoyment, like really just putting the camera further away for the mob encounters (it works really well for any boss) and replacing the cooldowns with a TP system like Tales of and that would be pretty much ideal. There are a lot of XIV stuff in here with how the boss mechanics, AoE attacks and the like work out, and I always found XIV combat to be pretty much an action game with more sequenced pacing considering the multiplayer aspect and the boss structures, so XVI is pretty much a transition of that to a single player game where your skill and damage output takes control of the pacing of the fight, a more dynamic XIV and I'm fine with that. Working towards mastering Eikon abilities to be able to set them to any of your 3 equippable Eikons is a must in order to maximize the character expression of the abilities and I quite enjoyed that aspect, there are a good amount of opportunities for aerial combos, pulls, juggle enemies, and the diversity of the Eikons is great as well, with timing based attacks, gauge based attacks, rapid fire melee, and crowd control. Think one element that I would really loved was more weapon types, Eikons kind of serve part of that role but being on a cooldown means that you can't have that available at all times, maybe get a different weapon for every Eikon, could have made the combat system even more in depth. Much praise has gone to the bosses, specifically the Eikon ones and I won't disagree there, the scale and spectacle in incredible, and the occassional shift in gameplay styles like is a Hideki Kamiya title is something where I go, who am I to complain about that, and it's a spectable in the middle of a story I care about with characters I'm really attached to, so it's a great combo of style combined with the substance of the narrative.
My take on side quests is like this, you can either give me a mechanically interesting quest or a interesting story even if the quest itself is nothing special and I'll be happy with that, there can be side scenarios with both and there are some that are both in XVI, but a vast majority of them fall in the later side, they hit me with really good stories or interesting character moments, and these just get better as the game goes along, some scenes so good that you would think they aren't an optional scene. There is a lot of production values going on that aspect as well, from scenes directed with the animation quality of the main story important cutscenes, plus a lot of locations in the map are pretty much just made for side stories which I find neat. So despite the simplistic objectives and fetch quest nature of a lot of them, I still did and enjoy doing every single one of them before ending the game.
The world is split into main exploration areas for each nation you visit, each starts as a pretty detached "levels" but the more you progress each nation ends up becoming one well connected area, the "dungeons" as I'll refer to since they work pretty similarly to XIV's, are basically an action stage split between mobs, cutscenes, mini bosses and one grand boss fight or two in the end, which can be replayed normally or with some restrictions under an arcade mode, much like replaying dungeons/raids in the MMO. A familiar structure for me and one I enjoy.
One of the goals of the game was trying to expand the audience for Final Fantasy, in doing so, one of their decisions was to localize the game in more languages, they have some limits in budget so they had to make a choice, and with a weird stroke of logic, they decided to fully voice the game in Latin American Spanish considering that people played their games more over there than in Spain, one more point towards CBU3, this is the first Final Fantasy game fully translated and dubbed in that language, and with a big cast of Mexican talent, which was music to my ears, and dude every single sidequest is fully voiced, it took me like 70 hours to complete the game, and having a game of this scale done in my language with a lot of voices I love was amazing, and it came from Square Enix of all companies. I hope CBU3 gets to do that again in future projects and if not, well I'll treasure this dub forever.
I don't know what a real Final Fantasy game is but, I'll say that considering all I played of XIV and XVI, that I don't think there is anyone at Square that loves Final Fantasy and its elements like summons, the enemies, story themes and music as much as this team, like I don't think they would give such a great incarnations to Cid and Mid if they had some resentment towards those games, give the Eikons such great boss fights and center a story around them, the heavy use of the iconic main themes of the series in a ton of tracks, and include so many references to other games across its dialogue and worldbuilding otherwise. Honestly I don't care much for the discourse, but is pretty funny to me considering the games.
All the series needed to be peak was to have some Dragon Quest V on it, who would have thunk it.
Also arguably has the strongest gay character in videogames, that is something you can say about XVI.
54. Astro's Playroom [ PS5 ] - 6
Decent showcase for the Dualsense controller. The game has 16 levels, half of them are core 3D platforming stages and the other half are gimmicks that use the controller capabilities. The core platforming is fun, Astro feels good to control and it's enjoyable to explore around to collect coins and puzzle pieces despite some arbitrary ways the level change blocks the ability to back track, so if you missed something you have to restart the level. While I don't mind gimmick levels or mechanics in theory, Playroom's I felt mixed on, the functionality of the controller is fairly precise, but the feel itself or how it controls can be more of a hit or a miss regardless if the controller function works really well. There is also a lot of collectibles in the form of PS products and consoles, and a lot of references to Sony IPs and exclusives/former exclusives across their history, I don't know how much of my feelings and score for the game are affected from having the legendary Monster Hunter franchise have a reference next to Crash in the jungle level, plus a little after that Alucard from the mid Castlevania titles, that was definitely a choice.
Let’s just say they do two very different things extremely well and I appreciate what both offer. Actually, every game I played this year was AN ABSOLUTE BANGER, 10/10s for all different reasons.
