Games I Played in 2024

There’s no real plot driving this game, even by Atelier standards, but the Interrupt system is one of my favourite combat gimmicks, this is one of my favourite series soundtracks, and I love the gag comedy.

Look lads I’mma be real, I’m a man with priorities. For the first time ever in my life I installed a gacha, immediately dumped $120 into it to get gyaru Ryza and then didn’t touch it for the rest of the year 💪 . Anyway I liked the character models and animation from the little I played to get the stage where I could play the gacha. I’d love to go through the storyline, just unlikely to ever actually dedicate time to sit down and do so.

Colourful and fun.

Simple fun. You point, you shoot, the guns do silly things.

Pretty good. While I understand the initial backlash to an extent, I also feel it was treated very unfairly. Ring Racers isn’t like an official mainstream releases where review copies are sent weeks early for people to acclimate to the game, here people were putting pen to paper after literally like an hour with it. I don’t actually feel qualified giving a real verdict on this game so soon and nobody else should have either. This is a racer with a deceptively high skill floor and ceiling both (man it’ll make you feel like the worst player in the world), which will have a lifespan for many years to come. It should be obvious how impossible it is to give earnest review to such a title after a only a few months, let alone day one like many were. People have spent years playing SRB2Kart for its perfect position as a small filesize, lightweight kart racer on PC to pick up and play with friends, but Ring Racers does the precise opposite. So much of the outrage is just an inevitable effect of SRB2Kart’s success, that any change is seen as diminutive. But I think it’s great that the Kart Krew committed to doing something totally different, and even went so far as to make the storyline + presentation feel more like a complete mascot racer game instead of just a level pack. I can’t quite say I prefer it to the simpler gameplay focus of Kart just yet and I furthermore find myself hesitant to fully commit since it’ll be impossible to ever switch the squad over to this title instead, but I had a ton of fun exploring the mechanics and courses, even if I was always mentally exhausted by the end from trying to keep track of everything.

Really great to have the Budokai Tenkachi gameplay formula back after all these years of Raging Blasts or Xenoverses spectacularly failing to imitate its combat routes and control scheme. With that said, I do have qualms that this game too feels less sharp than BT3 – it’s almost inevitable at this point – but it’s still quite fun with a lot of complex mechanics, while maintaining that high-octane DBZ edge.

Fun but basic. Specifically, fun because of how basic it is, in a way that’s unique to many of these NES remakes. I do wish combat was faster, and with only 30 actual songs on the soundtrack it got repetitive pretty quick. However what I mainly wanted to achieve by playing this was to familiarise myself with Psaro and record footage of his scenes for any future discussions. People often cite him as Sephiroth’s older brother of sorts, or his originator (while completely forgetting Magus), though in doing so often without acknowledging that Psaro’s character design was only retroactively made to align with the Sephiroth/Magus archetype in 2001’s remake. But having played the game, I can now appreciate why this was enacted. There are light similarities in the dynamic of Psaro/Estark and Sephiroth/Jenova, or the “master of monsterkind” versus those “chosen to rule this planet” where both ultimately cease their current form to evolve into a god. But the main thing was just the general vibe of Psaro’s introduction. The way they build him up in the background can be seen as paving the way for Sephiroth’s eventual advent. For majority of the game Psaro is just a name you hear thrown around by monsters, or told of as a powerful warrior in the colosseum. FFVII takes a similar approach, where you hear everyone gushing about this legendary hero from a few years back (true to form Psaro in the DS port also has Hero skills as a party member), only finding traces such as his sword until several hours into the game when he finally appears on the cargo ship. Alena returning home at the end of her chapter only to find the castle eerily silent is a similar story beat to Cloud’s party following the trail of blood in Shinra tower. And perhaps most striking is when the hero’s village is set ablaze like Nibelheim. Realistically I still need the NES version under my belt for the most complete context, but for now I’m satisfied with this. Good game.

Pretty good and I get why this was such a phenomenon for literally every single other person, but ultimately…I just don’t think I’m much of a FromSoft guy. Not their high difficulty, hand-cramping control schemes, hard to follow storylines, super abstract sidequests or stat-building. Also, just a personal peeve, but I don’t think they do giant enemies super well and Elden Ring is littered with them. All these behemoths look cool while standing off in the distance, and then it quickly ruins the spectacle when the battle invariably devolves into camping under the groin and slashing their ankles. But I do like good world design or big setpieces where gameplay and soundtrack come together, so wandering the high-production world was quite fun.

Honestly? I don’t hate the game (how can you hate something which recreates FFVII’s original cinematography and music so faithfully). Micromanaging the builds over a long period of days is a decent distraction, and obviously as F2P the only thing I’ve lost to it is time. I picked it back up for a month or three this year to reach the point where I could record the new prerendered scenes of Sephiroth for something (the rebalanced story difficulty has definitely been a blessing), and I still login a little every now and then if I’ve got absolutely nothing else to do.

Of course gotta time a replay to finish right as Rebirth releases. Ran with the PS5 version this time, since it’s the remaining port I haven’t played and it’s essentially free when you buy Rebirth’s Twin pack. I’ve barely touched my consoles the past few years since moving to PC, but it’s nice every now and then to revisit the ease of just plopping a Playstation under the TV and playing from bed. Big cozy.

Really cool to explore the environments from this perspective, but impossible to play seriously with due to the sickening camera movements. A shame that each having their own camera protocols means it isn’t possible to use this and the Unreal Engine Unlocker 4 freecam simultaneously.

Devil in the Details | Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Review

Review as above. Other than that, I feel like I didn’t take enough time to really emphasize the high quality compositions and crazy genre spread.

• Big angry didgeridoo & orchestra
• Horror instruments & JENOVA chanting
• Funky theme for a minor character that secretly becomes on of the best on the OST
• Somber cutscene music
• Still managing to reinvent J-E-N-O-V-A in unique ways
• One-Winged Angel arranged like you’ve never heard before
• Listen to the Cries of the Planet hitting like it’s 1997
• The Promised Land hitting like it’s 2004
• Vincent becomes a Bloodborne boss
• Long, expressive symphonic pieces
• Going hard on the minigame music
• Cleverly splitting FFVII’s original overworld theme up into sections for the various regions
• Bringing in music from the extended series to fill locations that didn’t have unique bgm before

And, like, legitimately hundreds and hundreds more. In the same breath Rebirth will go everywhere from rock to military parade to gentle emotive sounds to bubblegum pop to hip hop. You really cannot understate how downright insane they’ve gone on the production.

A fair followup to its ambitious (and imo unfairly treated) predecessor. Serah and Noel don’t quite have the same nuance that Lightning displayed in XIII, but they serve really well as deuteragonists getting to know each other across the journey, knowing when to hold back and when to probe on complex emotional issues. Final Fantasy staples are all here: Great music, story, combat, characters. The aggressive ATB combat didn’t wow me as much as it did a decade ago (or maybe the balance was just different idk), but I enjoyed the metagame of taming monsters. Overworld gameplay was pretty decent too. The worlds are all large, and NPCs having so much dialogue, dynamically moving around the town, responding to magic and Mog etc helps to make them feel alive in a way. But Always appreciate that FF has actual character romance, which is especially felt in the XIII trilogy. Look at Serah! She’s a married girl! Despite the main storyline being pretty short by FF standards, Serah’s death in the shock ending does hit. I suppose they could only do such a thing because they were already planning to extend XIII into a trilogy, but man does that sudden twist of Chaos erupting and the bells ringing out as it pans over to Lightning’s crystal leave an impact. Caius’ presentation was fantastic too. While having nowhere near the screentime or complexity, his visual direction calls to mind Malos, which can only be praise. In fact, since I have lineage brainrot active rn, this game has given me a furthered appreciation of the FFXIII project as being what would happen if you took FFVII (Lightning = Cloud, Caius = Sephiroth), Chrono Trigger (time travel), Xenogears (urban city considered ruins, in conjunction with other Xeno parallels), Xenosaga (equivalent city design in Miltia & Academia), Xenoblade 1 (Yeul’s visions and changing the future) & even Xenoblade 2 (Caius & Malos as dark purple Sephiroth remnants with similar swords & motivations) despite the saga predating it, Shin Megami Tensei (Lightning Returns’ apocalyptic, biblical tone) and smushed em all together into a single aesthetic. Unsure if I can sustain a piece on that enough to be worth publishing, but it’s food for thought.

It’s the end of the world, in the most Biblical way. This game represents Abrahamic apocalypse in such a powerful way, with many things either straight out of or contrasted against Revelations. Super strong aesthetic on display here. This game is palpably dystopian, it’s moody in the best way imaginable. Its ambient BGM drones on at night. Distant church bells are eerie and discomforting. The air is heavy. The people are weary. Death counts just shy of 900 people are reported every single day. Realistic stores, stations and NPCs capture well the sense that Lightning is a holy intruder descending upon a real world. LR’s dystopian mood is very reminiscent of SMT, and the sense of desperation and urgency in trying to save everyone before God awakes is completely in line with Majora’s Mask. A fusion of MegaTen and Majora’s Mask – what a potent combination. The time mechanics are stressful, but a cute idea with the time-sensitive quests or small moments like waiting for the train. But the time limit unfortunately damages one’s ability to appreciate some of FF’s most in-depth town design (Luxiern is a great town layout, reminds of Midgar in many ways.). The large fields are interesting and you can definitely understand how this game paved the way for XV, XVI and VII Rebirth. However I would have liked a longer, more in-depth story. FFXIII-2 had this same problem, but they imo backpedalled way too hard after XIII’s reviews slander came out, to where the plots in its two sequels don’t feel as expansive or prestigious. They’re comparatively brisk, which is a bane upon them considering how insane the setting leaps between each are. XIII-2 and XIII-3 needed a lot more justification than XIII did, but get a fraction of the runtime. Like, having finally gotten through the trilogy I see why Lightning is treated as the uncontested strongest character in Final Fantasy. Those last run of cutscenes where she cuts down creator-god Bhunivelze in conceptual space are wild. But I’m not convinced that the leap to that scale is earned, exactly. It sure is a spectacle and space finale always goes hard, but I wish they weren’t so scared of cutscenes and complexity after the first game’s backlash.

Aesthetically peak. Persona 5, SMT V and now this? Atlus can’t keep getting away with it! It should come as no surprise that the first adjective anyone would ever describe their games with is “stylish”. The world design and music create such a unique impression (particular picks include Warriors in Arms, You Face Louis Guiabern, Journey’s Legs, Treasured Moments and Louis’ character theme), and I liked how many anime cutscenes there were to really give the story a premium feel. Admittedly I did groan when it turned out to simply be Persona in a different coat of paint, since I don’t really enjoy the way that series handles the calendar system, short days or attribute-raising. But these elements ultimately didn’t bother me here as much as Persona 3 or 5. Just newer and better I guess. And I mean, it sorta triumphs over Persona for having an actual protagonist instead of a silent self-insert anyway. And overall despite feeling like a more complete package I do think that SMTV still did nearly every individual avenue better in comparison. Still. Great party-building, great dungeon-crawling, great combat, music and characters. The story picked up around the infiltration at Brilehaven and from then on I was pretty antsy to get through the rest of it, with exciting twists like the modern ruins beneath Vargia (Drakonian Shinjuku and the overall muddy colour palette of the game definitely make me hope that Shin Megami Tensei IV will be the Persona 3 Reload team’s next remake project) or all the political kerfuffle around the tournament.

All characters were pretty likeable (if not played a bit too safe), but the main antagonist Louis in particular is a someone that I recognise as having the makings for my favourite villains list. He really steals every scene he’s in. His ingame model looks ferocious, so when he abruptly walks in frame with his accompanying march it grabs your attention. A big thing for me is that I like deceivers. I like characters that can attack with fanciful word and forceful ideology before ever drawing their sword. If I only enjoyed Atlus’ storytelling or gameplay loop more, then once the experience has had more time to sit with me I’m sure he’d make the cut, since in a lot of ways I’m led to compare his character design, motivations, political deceptions and underlying insanity to Sephiroth (FFVII), Vayne (FFXII) and Amalthus (Xenoblade 2) – three villains that are quite high on the list I’ve been writing.

As beautiful as they day I lost you. Or more beautiful, really, since the remake gives the game a very nice facelift. Metroid Prime is a near perfect game. Just you, the silent world and its abstract puzzles. I wish you didn’t have to cut through the Magmoor Caverns a comically high amount of times, but other than that the game just feels good to move, scan and shoot in. Love how creative they get with all the different visors.

While not worth the hype it’s getting imo, the aesthetic design is indeed very cool, and the implied story is very sad. Its soundtrack does a phenomenal job of setting the scene. The game is set on a crashed space freighter, following the characters becoming increasingly insane as resources dwindle and cabin fever creeps in, akin to Infinite Ryvius; It’s more of a The Thing than an Alien, you feel? The visuals are grimy and gory, and the innermost plot revolves around uncovering via symbolism and minimal dialogue cues that the player character has raped the only woman on board because the other three men were negligent in looking out for her safety + too hesitant to start issues by calling out Jimmy’s bad behavioural cues in the leadup to the incident. Playing with the villain as the perspective character is certainly an interesting angle. Especially when, despite the sci-fi setting, the story of corporate men trying to push Anya’s assault out of mind is one quite grounded and unfortunately close to reality. So I respect it artistically, but with this being 2024’s big showing for indie horror, it doesn’t really convince me that these games are worth my money as opposed to just watching IGP do it.

Fusing pokemon is interesting for a little bit, but the game doesn’t really sell me on this as being its main gimmick because once you’ve got a party sorted it basically just falls in line with the usual Kanto experience. Now, Kanto is good, and there are a number of unique storylines and locations in the second half which I was quite impressed with. And the presence of some genuinely challenging battles was refreshing considering we tend to steamroll through most other games in the pokemon formula. Hence the score. I guess it’s just that, in thinking about my experience, I was moreso getting my enjoyment from it being a high quality pokemon game rather than the fusion mechanics specifically.

Fantastic to finally have a high quality platform fighter with movement and animations that actually feel good to play readily accessible on PC. In some respects the introduction of shields, grabs and ledges make it less unique than the original Rivals of Aether, instead conforming to the usual Smash Bros expectations, but that only further serves to lock it into that niche. This deserves to dominate the PC platform fighter space.

Awesome gameplay, awesome action in the cutscenes, awesome music. Shadow using a timestop Chaos Spear in an official project is everything that the fanboy in me has ever wanted. I love that they managed to figure out a way to use the Maria redesign from the Sonic Channel artwork (hope they can one day do the same for Elise). Through this Fearless Year of Shadow campaign it really has been amazing to see Sonic Team finally have confidence in the character again, letting him hog the spotlight to be as weird and convoluted as his messy half-alien DBZ-lite self deserves to be.

It’s alright, but the merits of this game extend only about as far as you’d initially expect them to; Though on the shorter side Saga’s writing is nice to see since the setting + concepts serve as a notable intermediary in Monolith’s journey from Xenogears to Xenoblade and Mitsuda’s music is interesting as usual, also feeling like a stylistic midpoint between the two. Upscaling the 3D models with its 2D backgrounds and multiple camera angles call to mind the presentation of Final Fantasy VII (Einsatz also marks Monolith’s first, most blatant, Sephiroth clone). And it has an event viewer! Combat/exploration are a combination of easy and uninteresting that unfortunately lets it down, but ultimately I enjoyed seeing the game for its place in Xeno history. Pretty glad I didn’t play this several years back like I originally intended. I surely wouldn’t have appreciated it as a transitionary event for Monolith, or its visual nods to FFVII and Chrono Trigger, as deeply as I do now.

Favourite level was probably Panic’s Fury, which recreated a Bowser’s Fury-esque array of mini-challenge islands within SRB2’s engine.

Fun to mess around in.

zeldor but for when to you to and except play as zeldor game ( つ ◕_◕ )つ

The trailers promised this to be the Tears of the Kingdom equivalent for top-down Zelda, and it certainly made good on that…even if after a certain point every lock opens with a flying tile-shaped key. Fun little game (speaking of ‘little’ – I’m thankful this game decided to be brief amidst the unforgiving onslaught of October games). Quirky characters, great combat and area music, the Triforce finally front-and-centre again. Despite the shakeup in gameplay focus, it’s still The Legend of Zelda – one of the most reliable franchises in this medium. Nice to see Zelda herself finally get the protagonist role. Though less striking than her previous playable stints in action spinoffs like Hyrule Warriors and Cadence of Hyrule, the creativity of the echo system made her puzzle-centric gameplay feel totally distinct from Link’s usual hack-and-slash formula, therefore keeping the game super fresh even on our third time in this Hyrule. In the past I’ve tried to replay A Link Between Worlds but found that the initial magic has worn off and no longer view its reuse of Link to the Past’s overworld favourably, but Echoes of Wisdom changes things up enough I don’t believe that will happen.

Gaemplay and music is Tekken. Tekken is good. Moving onto the story campaign:

While I was sorta iffy in my initial response to Tekken 8’s storyline, each moment longer that I think upon it, the more I realise that despite the short runtime, quick conversations and constant over the top action spectacles there are actual layers to the dialogue & themes which satisfactorily understand and address the long suffering of Jin and Kazuya, by engaging with their growth from each individual game. This is good. Tekken is healing. It took this long for Jin and Kazuya to actually meant in a significant way, so I’m low-key glad that the story is like 70% just them in the ring. And the core focus on the two clashing stars means that both characters finally get the explorations they deserved. Like Tekken 7, it is again the epic final fight which really sticks out in the story. Jin vs Kazuya is a brutal gauntlet that must have lasted at least ten rounds. Burning right through their reservoir of Devil energy, and then beating upon each other as mortals. That confrontation being a focal point makes it easier to look back and see how each character was built toward this point.

For Jin this is particularly addressed through his relation to Devil, and therefore to himself and everyone around him. The moment that Jin realised he was anything more than just his mother’s family and a protector of Yakushima, let alone a Mishima or a demon, he began cursing his lost innocence and desiring death. Despite where his path takes him Jin has only ever wanted to fight for good, so learning about what dark forces comprise his identity leads him to believe his only ‘atonement’ for the sin of being alive is to purge it all. Including himself. “I am a monster, that’s all that’s left” as he says in Blood Rebellion. Jin’s been in this rut for almost his entire time in the franchise. Tekken 8, however, frames this differently. At last offering a way out from his suffering. The core of this plot revolves around the revelation that Devil Jin was never crazy – it was just Jin. Devil, as it turns out, is not actually a creature of hatred. So the reason he’s this maniacal, unstable monster who seems like he can’t control his power is all because Jin was upsetting the balance. Devil wasn’t wrestling for control, rather that was Jin lashing out against his genetic, cultural and familial heritage. Because he hated these aspects of himself so much Jin would punish himself, get even more negative from the increasing isolation, and then punish himself again in a downward spiral. But where Tekken has traditionally been this story of hate clashing against hate with no real heroes, the removal of Heihachi and resurgence of Jun means that Tekken 8 can finally be a storyline about love and healing. Jin’s growth has been misguided from the very beginning, and so the thing which I find most impressive about Tekken 8 is how boldly the narrative unbuilds Jin by stepping through the history of each game. Since his only real presence in the previous game was its cliffhanger, Jin walks into this straight out of Tekken 7. A moody man who, ultimately, just wants death. Despite the fact that there are those like Xiaoyu and Lars who really want to help him, Jin’s sole desire is to rid the world of “people like us”. To wipe away the Mishima filth and his cursed blood. But this time Tekken 8 itself wants to help him. The scenario writers are no longer out to hurt Jin. His largest point of contention is of course Tekken 6. Therefore, Devil begins deconstructing Jin by way of recreating T6’s signature shot of him on the throne, forcing Jin to gaze upon his evils. Yet then, Devil begins moving into Tekken 5 aesthetics (Devil Jin’s playable debut) with his outfit and BGM when he makes his move to begin helping his host. I loved how that was all told through gameplay. The three-stage battle against Devil was such a hype way to fuse storytelling into a fighter gameplay, especially the camera flip to switch into DJ for round 3. Jin’s Electric Wind Hook Fist is outclassed by the Mishima Electric Wind God Fist in the final battle, so Jin finally decides he’s mentally ready to unlock his sealed Mishima style, voiding his veer into kyokushin karate from Tekken 4. Finally, he looks at the camera and adjusts his gauntlet. Recreating Tekken 3’s iconic boxart, and calling his theme music into play. Jin’s had all these different definitions piled onto him during his time as the face of the franchise, getting increasingly bogged down in self-destructive tendencies or plot convolutions with each new entry. By the time of Tekken 8 neither the character nor the fans can really tell who or what Jin is anymore. But here he finally gets to pull back and say that just this once, even if it’s selfish, even if he doesn’t deserve it, he simply wants to be Jin Kazama, and he wants to live. And while I’m not sure either whether he deserves life, freedom or forgiveness, being the immense war criminal that he is, as a character who I’ve followed all these years I want him to live too. It has taken so long for him to reach this point (which I honestly never thought he would) and now I want that boy and his father to heal.

Then on the other side, we have some more important glimpses into why Kazuya has always wanted to live. At first, I didn’t think it appropriate how they presented the flashes of Heihachi appearing when Lars pushed back Devil Kazuya as something triumphant, since I don’t care what Tekken 7 tried to do – Heihachi is an evil, evil man. However upon looking again, those shots are actually in place to provide key insight into how Kazuya sees the world. Those are PTSD flashes. Because what Tekken 7 and 8 have chosen to emphasize for Kazuya is this real trauma embedded into him, due to having the great misfortune of being the son of Heihachi Mishima. So what Kazuya’s been doing in his adult life is more or less just amassing power to try and reach a point where he can feel secure. Heihachi left such deep scars when he killed the boy’s mother and threw him off a cliff that Kazuya literally feels like he needs to take over the entire world just to reach a point of freedom. There’s a momentary hesitation before punching Jin into the boulder during the final battle, where afterward he reiterates “A fight is about who’s left standing, nothing less”. His panicked self-defence instinct won’t let him stop the battle, and then his traumatic response is to justify it by telling himself that he definitely doesn’t regret hurting his son – surely not. This is one of the most important moments in Kazuya’s 30 year history; he isn’t saying that to Jin, he’s repeating it to convince himself of the mantra again and again. Because Kazuya is broken inside. Him seeing that terrifying shot of Heihachi when fighting Lars cruelly hammers back in that there is not a single person on Kazuya’s side. The only person to have ever supported him is Jun, and as far as he knows she’s dead.

Tekken 8 engages with the themes and aesthetic identities of Tekken 2, 3, 5, 6 and 7 in meaningful ways that vary from the coolest fanservice you’ve ever seen to deep stylistic storytelling.

Harada lied in his interviews, and I lied in my review. Tekken is in fact not healing

Great to have Heihachi on the roster obviously, but not only was bringing him back in the actual narrative an obviously terrible idea, they executed it in the worst way imaginable too. At the very least getting to see him crush everyone after regaining his memories was fun. I really liked the Heihachi theme megamix when he reawakened too. But how they got there with the unconvincing retcons to Tekken 7’s ending and boring Tekken monks unfortunately makes me feel like any goodwill I had for T8’s written content must be put into question, and that at long last I have to give into the fandom’s jeering and accept that it is my fault for caring about Tekken’s story.

Creative level design and objectives. I thought it was a unique touch that the gunplay is a bit more restrained compared to most other boomer shooters.

Screw it, *Dancing Mads your Love Live*.

Short, sweet and fun. That’s good video gaming. Nightwicked Aqours were a riot with their off-the-rails voice acting – really great to just hear those girls going nuts again. The card-based combat system in this one was incredibly fun, each turn evaluating your offense potential vs defense (I was saved by unearned heart of the cards nonsense in a final turn so many times). I liked that they reveal the enemy’s moves so that you have all necessary information to make a decision each turn, and that all unused cards going to graveyard at the end of a turn means it’s best to simply combo as much as possible. All the fun references to gags or quirks from the series were fun to see.