Game 20 of 2024 - Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Developer: BioWare
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Platform: PC
Genre: Action RPG

Difficulty: Moderate
Hours: 52

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 8.3/10

DA:TV is fine. Sure, it's a pretty bog standard paint-by-numbers fantasy story, the dialogue ranges from mediocre to downright embarrassing, and none of the characters are all that interesting, but there is a lot of fun to be had.

Let's start with the positives, I guess. The world is beautiful. Every corner of every city and cave and forest seems to be carefully designed, and it shows. 

 

The battle set pieces are something else, as well. There's some great setups here that lead to some dramatic fights (some annoying ones, too, but we'll get to that later).

How am I supposed to fight that thing?

The combat is also a good bit of fun, if a bit weird. Gone is the grim, bloody combat of the original games; this is some full on comic book shit. I chose to play as a mage, and you might think of mages as squishy back line characters but nope. My Rook was mostly a melee mage, shooting lasers and magic daggers and all that shit. Teleporting all over the damn battlefield chucking fireballs and lightning storms was a good bit of fun. And it's not just the mages that get lasers, the rest of your party gets them, too! They are constantly shooting glowing arrows from midair, breathing fire, and summoning firebombing griffons or whatever the fuck was going on there.

Ok, so now some of the negatives. Exploration is mostly fun, but for some reason there are some jumping/platforming segments and they suck. Awkward as shit. Also, fast travel is prevalent in this game thanks to some magical mirrors. While that saves a lot of time and that's appreciated, it kinda makes the world feel, I don't know, small? 

Combat? Like I said before, it's pretty fun. However, enemy variety kinda suffers after midgame. You're encountering the same groups of guys over and over again, and when BioWare wants a particularly difficult battle, it just adds more monsters. It gets boring, especially when you're just trying to get from point A to B and you have to bring down the same old armored-up HP tanks over and over again.

Speaking of combat, let's talk about dragons. It's in the title, after all. The first dragon fight is kind of exciting and all that, but they quickly grow tedious. Dragons have huuuuuge health bars, as expected, so they are already a time-consuming fight. Remember when I said there are some impressive set pieces? Well, for dragons, they're pretty much all the same. Big open arenas. Kinda has to be, I guess.

Also, some of the dragon attacks are hilarious. In addition to it's breath weapon, dragons also kind of just face plant at you. I guess they don't like using their teeth and claws to fight close quarters?

Veilguard scratched that fantasy action itch for a time, at least for me. It's certainly got it's warts, but overall I had fun. 

Game 17 of 2024: Dungeons of Hinterberg

 Dungeons of Hinterberg

Developer: Microbird Games
Publisher: Curve Games
Platform: PC
Genre: Action RPG

Difficulty: Medium
Hours: 20

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 8/10

Crap, I forgot to get screenshots. :(

Pretty fun little ARPG. Maybe a few too many dungeons? 

Dungeons of Hinterberg has a fun little story about a junior lawyer discovering her taste for adventure in the magical Austrian town of Hinterberg. See, sometime ago, dungeon portals just started randomly popping up throughout Europe (and I guess other places), and a tourist industry catering to would-be dungeon delvers emerged.

Hinterberg is such a place. You play as Luisa, a young lawyer on holiday looking for a little meaning in life. You begin each day having breakfast at the hotel, and your afternoons exploring one of the four different areas looking for dungeons to crawl. You don't even have to do a dungeon if you don't want, you can find a scenic spot and just chill for a day.

After your dungeon run, you come back to town to do your shopping and decide what to do with your evening. Do you want to see a movie or take a rowboat out onto the lake, or do you want to hang with that weird influencer or see who's by the campfire and chill with them?

You can forge relationships with a variety of different folks in town, and this was my favorite part of the game. Hanging with different people raises different stats, and when your friendship advances, you get certain perks, like additional tumbling stamina or specific upgrades.

The dungeons range from breathtaking to downright annoying (especially the wind dungeons, God I was so glad to be done with those); the frozen snowboarding dungeons in Kolmstein being my favorite.

I guess if I had any complaints, it's that the game gets a little repetitive near the end. By then you've fought every monster type enough times for fights to feel like a chore instead of a nice respite from solving dungeon puzzles. A pretty minor complaint to be fair.

Hinterberg is rendered in a pretty cell-shaded style that I really think does the subject matter justice. Every NPC is thoughtfully designed and visually distinct.

Dungeons of Hinterberg draws a lot of comparisons to the Legend of Zelda games, and I think that's mostly fair. They're clearly a huge influence, and if you're going to be influenced by something, it might as well be the best.

Game 14 of 2024: Skald: Against the Black Priory

Skald: Against the Black Priory

Developer: High North Studios AS
Publisher: Raw Fury
Platform: PC
Genre: RPG

Difficulty: Medium
Hours: 18

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 9.2/10

Hell yeah.

I've been waiting for this one. As a card-carrying old guy, I cut my teeth on CRPGs like Ultima, Baldur's Gate, and the Gold Box games. I checked out the Skald demo a year or two ago and was hooked.

And I'm happy to say I was not disappointed!

Everything from the crisp pixel art, the soundtrack composed on a Yamaha YM2413 sound chip, and the sword-and-sorcery cosmic horror story comes together beautifully to create an end product that is a worthy homage to the classics while being mindful of a modern audience.

You can pet the dog! And also cats.

Skald starts off the old fantasy classic: a shipwreck leaves you and your crew stranded on The Outer Isles, an Imperial backwater that has been experiencing strange events lately. You're tasked by Lord Berryn, a friend of your father's, to find Embra, his daughter. Embra's gone missing, and Lord Berryn thinks she was headed to the Outer Isles.

That one-eyed guy in your party is Roland. He carried me through this game.

Your custom player character has to explore the Outer Isles looking for clues to Embla's disappearance while helping the locals and putting together a ragtag crew. 

Hell yeah, Ibn! Let's, uh, shit on that!

Combat is turn based and tactical. You get the chance to deploy your party when you get jumped which helps to get your melee guys into range and your tanks to protect your casters. You get a variety of weapons, armor, and spells, but honestly, I didn't use magic other than healing all that much. The sword was mightier than the pen in my playthrough at least, as some combat spells just seemed a little underwhelming. When you do need magic users, though, make sure you have plenty of attunement potions to keep up their magic points; they can barely make it through one fight let alone many.

I ran into a few minor bugs, nothing I really cared about. Sometimes while shopping I would accidentally click on a character's portrait twice, which would immediately take me out of the shopping window and into the inventory screen. Not really a big deal.

The story is pretty standard sword-and-sorcery fare, and for the most part I really liked it. I could have used a little more background on the side characters, but for the most part it was enough that we faced supernatural horrors together to make me attached to them.

My playthrough came in at just under 20 hours, and I felt that was about right. I did all (I think) of the side quests and thoroughly explored the Outer Isles.

RPG fans, buy this game! It's pretty great!

Game 8 of 2024: Moonring

Moonring

Developer: Fluttermind LLC
Publisher: Fluttermind LLC
Platform: PC
Genre: RPG

Difficulty: Pretty Hard
Hours: 6 and counting

Finished: Not yet
Final Rating: 8.3/10

If you love old-school RPGs like Ultima and Pool of Radiance, Moonring is for you.

If you love actually typing in what you say to NPCs hoping to find hidden topics, Moonring is for you.

If you love being out in the wilderness, surrounded by monsters, out of food, wondering what you're going to do to survive, Moonring is for you.

If you like seeing screens like this over and over again, Moonring is for you.

Everything kicks your ass in this game

You're not a hero in Moonring, you're an adventurer. You'd be well advised to remember that on your journey to find the gods' relics and become the Archon. They say discretion is the better part of valor, and in Moonring, that was my mantra. Moonring doesn't care what your stats are; if you're in the mountains, you're going to encounter scary mountain shit. Make sure you save those pennies for good weapons and armor, because you're going to need them.

These goddamn hornets can fuck all the way off.

You'll also need to manage your hunger and avoid disease. Alchemy ingredients are aplenty, so make sure you stock up so you're prepared when the inevitable rot, madness, or poisoning happens.

Moonring isn't for everyone, but for those who give it a shot, they will find a surprising deep game with an interesting world filled with secrets. At the low, low price of $free, what do you have to lose?

Game 2 of 2024: Shadows Over Loathing

Shadows Over Loathing

Developer: Asymmetric
Publisher: Asymmetric
Platform: PC
Genre: RPG

Difficulty: Moderate
Hours: ~14

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 9.5/10

I absolutely adored West of Loathing. I played it with the Steam Link app on my phone so I could play it in bed before finally going to sleep. I wandered the map in hopes of more zany random encounters.

But.

Is the same true of Shadows Over Loathing?

Yes! Yes, yes, yes, a million times yes.

Well written, clever, hilarious, and surprisingly deep, Shadows Over Loathing is a hearty, satisfying experience.

There's an arachnophobia and arachnophilia setting if you're into that kind of thing.

The story starts off with the main character, custom made by you of course, getting a letter from their Uncle Murray beseeching them to come to Ocean City to help with an experiment.

Of course, when you get there, Murray has vanished. You need to solve the mystery of his disappearance by travelling to such places as The Big Moist, a university where you can get jumped by frat dudes and clouds of abstract numbers, and a county that has been overrun by a fossil fuel company. There are a ton (and I mean a ton) of items to gather, from hats (which you equip for stat changes), pants (same), weapons, and shoes (which don't change your stats but change your walking animation). They are almost all hilarious and reflect the game's unique character.

Every scene is given that unique Loathing touch.

Combat is turn based and can get surprisingly hard at times. There are fights where the enemies hit like Mac trucks and you need to make full use of your items and abilities in order to time your attacks correctly. Shadows Over Loathing throws you a bone here; when you hover over enemies you get to see what their next attack is going to be (and they can't be cheesy and change it). This way you can prioritize your actions and make sure you survive another round.

Sometimes there are fights that are just too tough. When you get beaten, you don't die but basically expelled from the fight with an additional perk (sometimes good, sometimes bad). There are often ways to bypass these fights if you have certain items or perks or if your stats are high enough.

I guess if I had one criticism, it's that I had enough experience to buy all the abilities by mid-game, and I didn't really grind or anything. I did try and explore all the locations I found, which might have had something to do with it. I never found money an issue and was able to buy all the stuff I needed. You also find a ton of items and weapons in the field.

I know the art style isn't going to be for everyone, being a black and white stick figure game, but I think it's quite well done and effective. There are some cool, simple graphical effects here and there, but nothing I would describe as ground breaking. I guess if extreme graphical fidelity is something you need, steer clear, but I would urge any RPG fan to grab this immediately.

Gamedec - Game 19 of 2023

Gamedec

Developer: Anshar Studios
Publisher: Anshar Publishing
Platform: PC
Genre: RPG

Difficulty: Easy
Hours: ~4

Finished: No
Final Rating: 6/10

In Gamedec, you take on the role of a... Gamedec. A Gamedec is short for Game Detective, someone who traverses the virtual worlds of the near future and solves crimes.

Fletcher Garrett, my Gamedec

Gamedec takes place in future Warsaw; it immediately throws a shitload of jargon and worldbuilding at you and never freaking stops. You have a journal where you can look this stuff up, but that doesn't really do you a lot of good when you're in dialog and one of the options is "Use Screen Jibba Jab Matrix" and you don't know what the fudge that is because it's never come up before.

Honestly, I wish we spent a little more time in future Warsaw because it seems like a really interesting place. Instead, we are originally thrust into an extreme S&M virtual game (it's not really racy or anything). Following that, we visit Harvest Time, the future's version of Farmville, I guess.

The areas you explore are rather small and self-contained. What you have is a very linear story; once you're done in Farmville Harvest Time, you won't be coming back. The story, at least what I experienced, seemed decent. Both meatspace and the virtual worlds you traverse are populated with some interesting folks. You'll come across characters that are exploiting children for cheap labor (and pumping them full of stims), the spoiled, psychopathic scion of a wealthy businessman, and some cross between Cthulu and uh, It?

Subtle.

All in all, Gamedec isn't bad, but I just couldn't make myself finish it. Awkward dialog, limited exploration, and what I felt was a clunky deduction system all kind of took away from the interesting world I felt was there, but just out of reach.

Springblades - Game 18 of 2023

Springblades

Developer: Sokpop Collective
Publisher: Sokpop Collective
Platform: PC
Genre: RPG

Difficulty: Moderate
Hours: ~7

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 7.5/10

Springblades is a bite-sized, Paper Marioesque turn-based RPG rendered in a juvenile MSPaint art style, which I don't mean as an insult because it's awesome.

The story is simple: the princess needs you to collect three gems possessed by three strong bosses. Along the way, you'll meet all kinds of enemies, like rabbits, horses, deer, flop ghosts, pet rocks, farmers, chickens, you get the idea.

In addition to the three super bosses (indicated by a red skull on the map), there are a host of other bosses, usually guarding a town or some other location you can buy stuff at. The map is larger than I expected, and when you unlock a new location (usually by beating the boss) you can use it to warp to other locations you've unlocked.

Character progression is simple. With each level up, you can choose more HP, more energy points (so you can do more on your turn in combat), or more BP (badge points). Badges are one of the three equipment types you get, the others being weapons and armor. They usually give you some sort of perk or special ability, like the ability to bite or a bonus to accuracy.

The player's abilities are derived from their equipment; the right combo can make a super-difficult boss (dwarven prince lol) trivial. I had a lot of fun tweaking my equipment to certain encounters, as some combinations which seem amazing (badges that deal free damage when an enemy misses, for example) can absolutely screw you over in certain fights.

Good stuff.

Game 17 of 2023 - The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante

The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante

Developer: Sever
Publisher: 101xp
Platform: PC
Genre: Visual Novel/RPG

Difficulty: Surprisingly Difficult 
Hours: ~6

Finished: Yes, sorta
Final Rating: 8/10

I can't really say too much about my playthrough of The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante without spoiling the game. It's great, though, really.

TLASOSB is, if you can imagine, a hardcore RPG/visual novel mashup. As a kid I read Choose Your Own Adventure books religiously, and it's kinda like that plus you have stats that change with the choices you make.

You play Sir Brante from birth to death, and yeah, he often suffers. There are no 'good' or 'optimal' choices here; you can't please everyone. Someone is always going to mad at you. During my playthrough, I stood up to my asshole grandfather and he just fucking wasted me right in front of my parents with his cane, giving me my first death. You get up to five deaths before you experience 'true death' and face judgement from The Twins (the gods of Sir Brante's world).

TLASOSB is very well written and paced, with a compelling branching storyline and many complex characters. It comes to life in the pages of Brante's journal, complete with nice illustrations and character portraits. Brante's journal contains a map and pages that show your stats and relationship with the characters you've met so far.

Also, Sir Brante's voice actor sounds like a dude straight out of Baltimore.

Game 15 of 2023 - Dave the Diver

 Dave the Diver

Developer: Mintrocket
Publisher: Mintrocket
Platform: PC
Genre: RPG, Sim, Casual

Difficulty: Easy, mostly
Hours: ~22

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 9/10

Picture this:

You're exploring the glacial depths of the Blue Hole where no man has gone, when you come across an ancient geothermal vent. 

That's when you see Dunkleosteus!

This ancient, armored fish lived during the Devonian period, thought to be extinct for like 300 million years, but here it is, right in front of you!

What do you do?

I'll tell you what you do; you bring your trusty rifle to bear, shoot the shit out of this living fossil, and make sushi from the corpse.

Bancho makes goddamn incredible sushi from anything you put in front of him.

Dave the Diver is awesome. It's a mostly lighthearted adventure where you dive into the depths of the Blue Hole during the day, and help your bud Bancho run his sushi restaurant at night. Bancho relies on you to bring him fresh ingredients from the Blue Hole, including, Vampire Squid, sharks, octopus, and sea urchin. You can also find stuff like mayonnaise and sesame oil during your dives.

Bancho often hosts cooking contests and VIP customers. Gather rare ingredients to impress!

The environment is beautiful and the aquatic denizens are colorful and varied. Dave always has his trusty harpoon while exploring, so he can gather tasty looking fish and defend himself from the Blue Hole's more aggressive denizens. You also get a rifle early in the game, and while it's powerful, ammo is limited. Don't worry, you can find more while diving.

No killing this guy, I'm afraid.

There's a few other distractions, like farming, phone minigames, and raising fish, but you'll spend most of your time diving for cool stuff and serving customers at Bancho's. You run yourself ragged waiting on the patrons, but luckily you can hire help as Bancho's makes more money.

I considered giving Dave the Diver a perfect score, but I had to dock for a particularly frustrating boss fight: the Helicoprion. You control two characters during the battle, but the camera doesn't seem to want to focus on either of them and Helicoprion hits like a friggin' Mac truck. Argh.

Otherwise, it's great and highly recommended!

Game 14 of 2023 - Starfield

 Starfield

Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Publisher: Bethesda Software
Platform: PC
Genre: RPG

Difficulty: Easy/Moderate
Hours: ~40

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 7/10

It's fine. End of review.

Starfield

Okay, fine.

Starfield does a lot of things, it just doesn't do anything particularly well. It does them all, fine, I guess.

Meet Blast Hardcheese.

There's a zillion quests, but the overwhelming majority of them are boring. Get coffee for that lady. Pick up the coffee order for the executives. Take this message to this guy on this planet and bring what he gives you back. Find a charred planet for some reason. Wash, rinse, repeat.

There was one quest, Entangled, that I felt was kinda cool. I couldn't help but think that the quest would have made a great game on it's own if fleshed out. 

There's one other quest chain that sticks out in my mind. Blast Hardcheese and Sarah Morgan ended up embroiled in a turf war in Neon between The Strikers and The Disciples. As we do quests for the leader of The Strikers, the less worse gang, the turf war escalates and Sarah and I end up in a shootout in Ebbside. The bullets and lasers are flying fast and furious, but The Strikers prevailed!

That's when I notice him.

A Chunks employee, lying in the gutter, cut down in the crossfire. Was he killed by the Strikers? By the Disciples? By Sarah? By... me?

That was like the one quest I actually felt connected to, partly because I chose the Neon Street Rat for my character. 

Space travel is pretty much pointless, I mostly skipped space combat, and I never really gelled with any of the characters. I found base and ship building too fiddly to get into, and I didn't want to spend points in those skills, anyway. I wanted to shoot things. With lasers.

Yeah, I guess there are a lot of planets to explore, but why? There's mostly nothing except copy/paste structures there. 

I'm sure some kickass DLC and mods will come down the pipeline in the near future, but I mostly pushed through this game out of obligation, being a fan of the Bethesda RPG since the days of Daggerfall.

So, yeah, it's fine. Nothing memorable, but fine.

Game 12 of 2023 - Death's Door (2021)

Death's Door

Developer: Acid Nerve
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Platform: PC
Genre: Action RPG

Difficulty: Difficult
Date Started: Apr 15 2023
Date Ended: May 1 2023
Hours: ~16

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 9/10

I almost quit this game about 10 minutes in. Let me tell you, I'm glad I saw it through, difficulty and all.

When looking into Death's Door, I kept seeing reviews that compared it to various Soulslike games. This put me off at first, since I am terrible at those games. I think I gave Elden Ring an hour, tops, and clicked the refund button after drowning my sorrows in a bottle of Assyrtiko.

What put me off at first was the lack of a map. I have absolutely no sense of direction. Here's the thing, though: once you learn how to play the game, it's actually quite accessible. I gave it some time and explored the world a bit, and eventually I kind of appreciated the lack of a map. You have to kind of wander and read the signposts, taking in the small details and encountering some of the enemies you'll face (and learning how to beat them).

This giant house is one of the first enemies in the game.

Don't get me wrong, Death's Door is pretty hard, but it has a much gentler difficulty curve than the standard Soulslike games. It's fairly forgiving in that when you die, you keep all the souls you collect and just get sent back to the nearest door you walked through. You fight two giant bosses in the first 10 minutes or so; trust me, Death's Door is not fucking around.

You're... going to see this a lot.

Yeah, the enemies can be tough, but as I learned their patterns (and died a lot) I slowly learned how to counter and anticipate the enemies moves to become an absolute killing machine.

Yeah, that's what you get! Plenty to go around!

The nameless crow protagonist, the Reaper, encounters a wide variety of interesting characters, both friend and foe. There's Pothead, an unfortunate soul whose aunt tried to make him immortal by turning his head into a pot. He, of course, asks you to waste her.

"Look, I just met you, but you need to kill my aunt. Kill her good."

Mercy is for the weak. Put her in a body bag!

Death's Door has a charming, humorous, tone that helps the difficulty go down easier, like sugar with the pill. The bosses you face are fearsome to be sure, but you can't help but love them.

Honestly felt kinda bad killing this guy, but I'm a Reaper and a Reaper's gotta reap.

Death's Door is rendered in a simple, cartoony style, but is aesthetically arresting. This, combined with the clever level design and puzzles, provided a great incentive to wander the world and discover its secrets.

A nice room in which to take a breather before reaping the fuck out of little gremlins or whatever.

Gorgeous.

tl;dr: Death's Door is great and you should play it.

Game 4 of 2023: Chained Echoes

 Chained Echoes - A Substantial Slice of JRPG Sentimentality

Developer: Matthias Linda
Publisher: Deck13
Platform: PC
Genre: JRPG

Difficulty: Difficult
Date Started: Feb 2nd 2023
Date Ended: Mar 4th 2023
Hours: 37

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 8/10

Chained Echoes looks a lot like something I would have played in middle school. Made by mostly one person, Chained Echoes is a love letter to the classic JRPGs of yesteryear that proudly wears its influences on its sleeve. Allusions to those classic RPGs abound, some subtle, some not. The game's incredibly well-done, charming pixel art graphics belie a fairly mature story and rather sophisticated combat.

The broad strokes of the story are pretty standard JRPG fare (motley group of friends must band together and defeat world-ending superbeings), but the best parts are the details, the little moments between characters that kept me mostly interested in seeing it through to the end. There are 12 characters you can get in total but some you can miss if you don't do all the side quests. Most of the important characters get pretty satisfactory arcs, particularly Robb, who begins as a callous asshole whose only redeeming quality is that he can poison enemies. There's definitely some cringe dialog, though.

The fantasy world we're given to explore is pretty interesting, filled with colorful and visually striking locations. You'll visit breathtaking mountaintops, sewers (there must be a law requiring games of this type to have a sewer level), island resorts and floating castles. The setting is a neat mix of the sort of generic RPG fantasy world many of these games have in common, with some science fiction elements (flying mechs and airships). Despite the cliches, the world feels well done because special attention has been given to the details, and the details are what make the world interesting and engaging.

The combat, while engaging, kind of dragged for me sometimes. The game does away with random encounters, but the encounters you face on the map are more challenging; if you just spam your standard attack, you'll quickly fail. Your party completely heals between each encounter, so Chained Echoes expects you to be at your best during each fight, taking advantage of enemy weakness and swapping out characters on the fly(which is a pretty cool feature) in order to win. I found enemies in the first area that were capable of completely wiping out my party. Despite the difficulty of some combats, the game is quite forgiving, allowing you to just replay the battle upon defeat if you so wish. I liked the idea of fewer but more rewarding encounters, but I felt that the enemies were often just damage sponges which made battles take some time. But hey, I'm old with precious little free time so to each their own.

There's a satisfying equipment upgrade system that often has you making a tough decision about equipping the cool new sword you just got in the dungeon, or upgrading the current one that already has some useful power ups. Rather than getting money after battles, you get items and 'loot.' A lot of the items you get after fights can be used to upgrade your equipment, while the loot is vendor trash. I certainly appreciate the efficiency of just getting money after a fight, but why the heck would a crab carry around a bunch of gold?

Exactly, it wouldn't. That crab would not carry gold around.

Anyway, this took me a little shy of 40 hours to beat. I got all the characters and did all the side quests and learned tons of skills for each character. 40 hours is a little bit longer than I would normally spend on a game like this (again, old, little free time, etc) but it was worth it in this case. This is getting a recommendation out of me.

Game 1 of 2023: Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade (2020)

Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade - a Thorough and Fair Review

Developer: Squeenix
Publisher: Squeenix
Platform: PC
Genre: Action RPG

Difficulty: Not Sure
Date Started: Jan 1st 2023
Date Ended: Jan 3rd 2023
Hours: 1 (Refunded)

Finished: No
Final Rating: 2/10

I adored Final Fantasy VII for the PS1 back when it came out in 1997 or so. I put something like a billion hours in and when a friend of mine accidentally erased my save when I was grinding materia in the downed Shinra plane I cut him out of my life. I dont talk to him anymore. Fuck that guy.

The title screen of a better game.

I spent hours breeding chocobos and grinding Materia and when I was able to one shot the last boss with a fully-powered Knights of the Round, it was all worth it. I fought all the stupid Weapons and I got all the gimmick weapons for the characters. I'd find excuses to call out of work so I could play more Final Fantasy. On my third or fourth playthrough, I hooked the audio cables on my PS1 to my tape deck so I could record the ending music.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I liked it.

Absolute unit.

26 years later, my memories of this game are still vivid. If I was forced to list my top 10 games of all time this would almost certainly make the list. I haven't really enjoyed any of the Final Fantasy games since then (I guess IX was ok) but man, VII? Formative gaming experience for sure.

It's been a zillion years but these backgrounds still bring up some strong feelings.

Also, Avalanche are just straight up fucking terrorists.

Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade fucking sucks though and I wanted to die every time a character spoke. Refunded after an hour. That's my review.

Oh well. On to something else.