Did Final Fantasy VII Rebirth need to be a humongous, obscenely long open-world game?

I’m not going to bury the lede here: yes, I firmly believe that Final Fantasy VII Rebirth did need to be humongous, obscenely long open-world game. So let’s spend a bit of time talking about that.

It’s become fashionable to bash open-world games in the last few years, at least partly because for a good long while now, big-budget developers and publishers have been using them as something of a crutch. Rather than providing a carefully structured, well-paced experience, a lot of developers seem to believe that offering the player what they consider “true freedom” (which in practice is rarely anything of the sort) will make up for the game’s shortcomings in other areas.

While there are a lot of companies out there who are very much guilty of that, when Square Enix has made an open-world game — particularly, but not exclusively, one in the Final Fantasy series –it has usually come out rather well. And Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is the best to date. Let’s take a closer look.

Continue reading Did Final Fantasy VII Rebirth need to be a humongous, obscenely long open-world game?

Princess Peach: Showtime! – some impressions from the demo

I like Mario games, but I enjoy it more when Nintendo gives their other characters a bit of time to shine independently of the portly plumber. Which is why I’m so intrigued by Princess Peach: Showtime!, a game that seems to have been attempting to distance itself from the “platformer” designation in favour of… what?

Well, a demo came out for it yesterday, so I downloaded it today and gave it a play over lunchtime. The demo is pretty brief, consisting of just the game’s introductory sequence and two individual levels — one for Peach in her Swordfighter costume and another in her Patissiere outfit — but it was enough to intrigue me.

Let’s take a closer look, and ponder what I hope to see in the full game when it comes out later this month.

Continue reading Princess Peach: Showtime! – some impressions from the demo

The lost art of “just enjoying something”

The Internet has done many things to our collective consciousness, attention spans and numerous other aspects of our existence, but one thing that saddens me more with each passing year is how the art of just enjoying something for what it is — rather than mourning what it isn’t — seems to be slipping away from everyone.

What I mean by this is the way in which I can’t remember the last time I saw someone simply say “I like this” with genuine passion and enthusiasm. It’s far more common for people to pick fault with literally everything, often under the justification “it’s important to criticise the things you love”.

But is it? Is that not just setting oneself up to be perpetually unsatisfied? It certainly looks like it from here.

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Some spoiler-free early impressions from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

I’ve been eagerly awaiting Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and it actually arrived at my house a couple of days early! As such, I’ve been playing it for the last couple of evenings, and wanted to share a few initial thoughts.

I’m not going to spoil anything about the plot in this piece, because I’m not very far into said plot, and there are seemingly some very interesting things going on. We’ll talk about all that another time; today I wanted to focus particularly on the gameplay that unfolds after about two or three hours: the point at which the game properly “opens up”.

And yes, in a marked contrast from its predecessor Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth really does open up. So let’s take a closer look at that.

Continue reading Some spoiler-free early impressions from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE could have gone deeper

I’ve just finished playing through Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE, the latest title from the wonderful Inti Creates, and it’s an interesting one for sure.

Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE is an open-structure 2D side-scrolling platform game that unfolds in a fantasy universe that is a spinoff to Love Live Sunshine. While the characters that appear in the Yohane the Parhelion universe are based on their Love Live Sunshine counterparts, they’re regarded as distinct and separate characters in their own right. One possible interpretation of the whole thing is that it’s a chuunibyou delusion on the part of the eponymous Yohane, aka Love Live Sunshine character Yoshiko Tsushima.

To be honest, it doesn’t really matter all that much, because plot is not this game’s strong suit. In fact, there are a lot of elements to this game where I feel like it could have gone into quite a bit more depth, but I nonetheless enjoyed my time with the game and would recommend it to fans of this sort of thing. So let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Continue reading Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE could have gone deeper

Goodbye, Meg

It’s time for a personal post today. Normally I would reserve this for my personal blog I’m Not Doctor Who, but since the last time I regrettably had to do this it was here on MoeGamer, it’s only fair to the departed that this time it’s here, too.

Today we lost our beloved Meg, our cat who joined our family back in 2016. She was just 12 years old, but sadly she was suffering with what looked like fairly severe liver cancer and had to leave us before what we all thought “her time” should be.

Much like when we lost her playmate Ruby — who we suspect may have been her daughter, though we have no real confirmation of this — I wanted to leave a permanent record of the mark Meg made on our family and lives, and celebrate how much she was loved.

Continue reading Goodbye, Meg

Is Burnout Paradise still good?

It’s fair to say that Burnout Paradise was, on its original release, simultaneously very well received and rather controversial.

Few would deny that it is a quality game, and one packed with things to do both offline and online, but for some it also represented an early example of how open worlds were starting to make unwanted intrusions into all manner of different games.

That was in 2008. Ten years later, in 2018, Burnout Paradise Remastered was released on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. And six years after that, I picked up a Switch copy for a tenner. Seems like a prime opportunity to see how well this game has stood the test of time, non? Read on, and let’s see.

Continue reading Is Burnout Paradise still good?

Another look at Granblue Fantasy: Relink after finishing its main scenario

I rolled credits on Granblue Fantasy: Relink after about 20 hours of play. That might sound short for an RPG — and it is, by modern standards — but reaching the end of that main story is also potentially far from the end of your time with the game.

We’ll explore that side of things in more detail another day (mostly because I haven’t really delved into the “endgame” as yet) so today we’re taking a look at the gameplay experience while you’re playing through the main scenario.

Without wishing to spoil things too much, I had a great deal of fun playing through Granblue Fantasy: Relink. So let’s take a closer look at exactly why this game works so well.

Continue reading Another look at Granblue Fantasy: Relink after finishing its main scenario

How Ace Attorney does so much with so little

We live in an age where, at the upper end of the market, video game budgets are spiralling out of control in a relentless pursuit of movie-like photorealism.

And yet, a series of games that first appeared just under 25 years ago (at the time of writing) has pretty consistently been doing such a great job of telling its stories with minimal tech that its publisher, Capcom, still regards it as one of its most valuable intellectual properties.

I am, of course, talking about the Ace Attorney series, and I thought it might be fun to look at some aspects of how these games present their stories to the audience — something that has remained fairly constant over its complete run, despite spanning several hardware generations. So let’s do just that!

Continue reading How Ace Attorney does so much with so little

Helldivers II and the Battle Pass delusion

A few years back, you may recall that the gaming world was seemingly united against the scourge of microtransactions in full-price games.

The most prominent event that demonstrated this was the case of Star Wars Battlefront II, where an EA representative managed to score the most-downvoted Reddit comment of all time for his bollocks about “a sense of pride and accomplishment” while defending the lootboxes that were part of the $80 game’s predatory monetisation system.

Fast forward to 2024, and we have an article on a high-profile gaming site actually praising a game for not being quite as bad as other games that do similar things. Is it time to wave the white flag? Hell no it isn’t.

Continue reading Helldivers II and the Battle Pass delusion

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