Recent reviews by YoSaff

The port is...fine. It takes a bit of finagling with the button mapping to get it to run decently on a controller, and in the update to PC it's less been remastered than just reconsidered and smoothed over slightly. In general, this is almost the exact same experience people will have had on the PS1 back in the day.

The game itself is very good. The story goes on a lot of interesting tangents, the music is top-notch superb, the gameplay is engaging. It's got a lot of small minigames which don't really come up again or have a great deal of depth, but a lot of them (such as the motorbike, the submarine, the snowboard, etc) are all replayable at a later date. Things like the submarine and the Fort Condor minigame feel less like key parts of the story and more like aspects that Square were just incredibly excited to work on and were shunted into the game – and it's quite hard to criticise in good faith that amount of enthusiasm from a dev team.

The real star of the game is the Materia system, which is incredibly elegant. Your characters grow and level as the game progresses, but all of their magic/summons/extra commands are independent of them, levellable separately as the game goes on with their own improvements. While I've seen some people criticise this for making the characters feel interchangeable, I never had that – Cait Sith is never going to be a physical attacker regardless of how much you buff him, and Barrett will never be the best mage. It consists more of making you think about the best choices. This especially came to the front with the Battle Square – with one character only and (if you're late-game) an absolute deluge of potential choices, it becomes more like a puzzle than anything else. That said, I would have killed for a simple “save these Materia to this character” button to prevent the inevitable unequipping and re-equipping when I decide that I really should give Vincent a try.

Play it. It looks like ass, but play it anyway. It's an excellent investment of your time.

I slept on this game for far too long, and my only regret now is that I can't erase my memory of it all to experience it again for the first time. It's not the longest, but it has more than enough atmosphere to make it worth your time.

It's like Burnout Paradise, but with none of the fun!

"I didn't get any bloodlines from my last character. She killed a man with her ♥♥♥♥♥, is that not worth a bloodline?" - My girlfriend, 2019

10/10, would ♥♥♥♥♥murder again

Two years ago I was detained on my way into America. I was taken away from the line, seperated from my passport and dumped in a bleak empty room filled with lines of chairs and people in various states of distress. Nobody told me what was happening. Occasionally an agent would appear at the back of the room and give passports to some of the people waiting, who left quickly and quietly. At one point an elderly man went up to the desk and begged to be let through, to be met with ice-cold condescension.

After about half an hour I was called through into the back room. There I was told to sit down in front of a man called Keane, on a desk filled with papers. Keane never looked at me. He asked where I was going and why I was going there. When I said I was visiting my girlfriend he leered and asked me if it was "true love". When I asked him whether I'd been pulled out of the line for a reason or if it was a random check, he told me it "wasn't random". When I asked him if I would make my flight in 20 minutes, he told me that it depended how fast I could run.

Eventually Keane gave me my passport back and told me to "lift my heels up". I missed my flight by minutes. I waited for an hour for the next flight and then another hour on the plane for it to take off.

This game made me feel sorry for Keane.

10/10, would feel empathy against my will again

This is a really frustrating game because the concept is brilliant for a puzzle game (you have a giant ball and a tool for moving the ball, solve puzzles) but then they felt the need to implement combat. Combat has absolutely no place in this game - the mechanism for killing the standard enemies is just "run them over with the ball" and for the miniboss creatures who show up at the end just in time to stop the momentum dead in its tracks every one boils down to "place ball here, lure miniboss into damaging effect". If you're lucky that just involves hitting them with the ball, if you're not it involves luring them near electricity or landmines or oil trails or some other damn thing.

And don't even get me started on the recurring worm miniboss which spoils perhaps the best chapter of the entire game, which is just a rehash of the tentacle alien from the original Half-Life, only instead of distracting it with grenades you wait for it to go into an idle animation and then dash from place to place.

Honestly if they released some special no-combat-we-swear version of this then I'd have next to no problems with this (although there are always nitpicks, like how the game throws down checkpoints regularly but only saves after like a third of them) but as it is the game feels like it's stretched way too thin and it means that even the interesting ideas such as the anti-gravity field are woefully underutilized and undeveloped. Can't honestly recommend it in this state.