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[Dacvak]

Dacvak, I know I'm way late on this, but it's not that I didn't like Star Fox 64 per se, but rather that I'm not a huge fan of rail shooters and this one didn't persuade me otherwise. Maybe I'm just too old and too impatient to get into the genre.

And now I just went and blasted a game you just gave a 9/10 to... I have no complaints about Mario Land's music (a bit surprised to hear Orpheus in the Underworld in there, but whatever) and I do agree that the shmup parts were neat even if simplistic. But sloppy controls are an absolute no-no for platformers. And the fact that so many parts of a level were just repeated (presumably to save memory) made them feel disjointed to me. So the two parts of a platformer that make up ~90% of what I care about (controls and level design) were lacking, making this a mediocre experience overall. I guess having no nostalgia here makes a difference.

Fair take!

 

[TuFaN]

#55 Doom (2016) | PC | 8 hours | 8/10

My last playthrough was 7 years ago. I played it on an IPS monitor back then and just recently heard how great it is to play Doom and Doom Eternal on an Oled or Qled Monitor, especially if it has HDR, how drastically it would change the gaming experience. And I have to admit, playing it on an Oled rly makes a difference. It feels as if this game was created for Oled HDR TV's/Monitors. The rich blacks and vibrant colors are freaking awesome when consumed with the right monitor. Playing this game right after my 204 hour playthrough of Elden Ring and 82 hours of Red Dead 2 felt refreshing. I love how you can turn your brain off and just simply shoot stuff without worrying about how much life/mana/ammo/resources you've got left. It is gameplay 1st and anything else comes afterwards, just pure fun.

 

[marcincz]

Mid June and I beat 9 games. Hard year so far, but I've played many long games.

Game 8 - Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (PS5) - 72h 29m
Beat 06/05/2024 - my score: 8/10
To be honest I expected something better. Previous part was better. Sorry Sega.

Game 9 - Persona 3 Reload (PS5) - 84h 50m
Beat 12/06/2024 - my score: 8/10
Quite good, but not as great as P5R, which I adore.

 

[March Climber]

13) Final Fantasy XIII (Previously DNF, I had stopped last time at the last chapter) (Finished playthrough on Xbox Series X Backwards Compatibility)

Rating: D+

To go from PS2's final fantasy games to this felt like a slap in the face. Because of the game being a literal straight line of walking (aside from one section) with zero backtracking and barely any sidequests, all it had to hinge on was it's story and characters. I'm fine with linearity, but if you're going to do so, everything else has to be better to make up for it. Unfortunately, the story does that thing where they use a word salad of in-universe terminology to explain other in-universe terminology, in an attempt to get the player to read up on what the hell everything means. After reading the lore I found out that it wasn't even worth reading. All of the characters had the anime-style performances, but this time amped up times 11 to the point where almost no one felt grounded, or relatable, or even human.

I say almost no one, because the voice actor behind Sazh must have had a different voice coach for all of his sessions. He was the only person in the game who spoke like an actual human being going through all of the crap the world was throwing at him while looking for his son. I dropped the game a while ago because I grew increasingly annoyed at it, thank goodness for cloud saves though. Over the years(including recent youtube videos) I heard so many good things about it's sequel, which is why I decided to finally finish it and move on to that sequel.

All in all, my opinion didn't change, and this should have just been a direct to dvd movie with some bonus featurettes. At least the soundtrack with the same few songs remixed over and over was nice I guess.

14) Final Fantasy XIII-2 (Xbox Series X Backwards Compatibility)

Rating: A-

What a turnaround, in almost every single way.

Positives:

• Improvement of the battle system (made the combat much more fun and added more depth with creature capturing system)
• Character Performances. Yes, some of the anime-style acting still lingers a bit (and it definitely shows whenever you meet a character from the first game) , but wow did they manage to ground the performances much more in this game, especially of the main cast. Thank you to the voice director and thank you Square Enix America for hiring Jason Marsden as Noel Kreiss (the second protagonist, who also did the voice for Kid Flash in DC's Young Justice).
• The writing has less terminology word salad. It's still there to a certain degree, but this is a much more straightforward story, which is crazy to me because the game's main feature involves time travel and paradoxes.
• Noel is a great main character and a great addition to the FFXIII cast. He looks like someone who came out of Kingdom Hearts but talks and acts like someone who has seen some shit and has faced hardship, adversity, and death on multiple occasions. There is a mile of difference between him, how he's written, and nearly everyone else from the original FF13.
• The mystery-solving storyline of time is much better.
• You can play this game without needing to play the first. It does a great job of bringing you up to speed and summarizing things enough to where FF13 is not needed as a playthrough.
• The time traveling feature. Going to areas in different timelines to change the past to change the future to change the past. This along with sidequests that do the same and unlock more areas of different timelines, which can lead to secret endings or battles. It's. All. Great. It's fun and it makes it fun to discover these things, whether accidentally or intentionally, like doing something the 'wrong' way to get a different outcome. I actually kept track of items and quests because I was curious to know where they led down the rabbit hole of time.
• Due to the time traveling, they make good use of multi-tiered explorable areas that can change depending on the time period. The maps feel much more fun to explore again compared to 13.
• A much better soundtrack (aside from two terrible screamo boss music tracks that don't belong), and yes part of it is because they borrow songs from FF13, but they also add a bunch of their own music to it with nice background vocals.

Negatives:

• The villain could have been better, and there was a point where I could see they could have written him slightly better. They do a good job of him telling you his motivation from the very start and making the player/main character think nothing of it, only to bring it back around and say 'Hey dummy, He told you multiple times this is what he wanted to do and what he wanted you to do' in a great twist later in the game. A part of me wants to believe that he was 'acting a part' due to how he was talking and behaving, because he had to in order for his goal to be accomplished. I just don't know if the director of this game was that good though and if that was intentional or not. It worked enough for me to like it however
• The minigames were below average, but I forgive this due to the amount of time shenanigans the game has.
• I guess you can say the graphics and cutscenes took a small hit compared to the last game, due to the scope of this game. I didn't care though as it was a better game.

I can type more and rave about this game, but I won't. This should have been the real FF 13. Instead it is this golden nugget that's sandwiched between one of the most divisive mainline games ever, and one of the most divisive sequels ever(Lightning Returns), to be neglected as a middle child that has been shoved into a box with both of them.

Still, if anyone is slightly curious about the FF13 trilogy, I mainly recommend FFXIII-2.