Category Archives: Features

Final Fantasy VII Remake

Reflections on Final Fantasy VII Remake Hard mode – a solid New Game Plus implementation

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“Back in the day,” as those of us of a certain age tend to say, it wasn’t unusual to replay a favourite game to see everything it had to offer.

Sometimes you’d play the game again immediately after finishing it; at others, you’d leave it a while and then come back to it fresh. Sometimes the game had additional things to discover when you played it through after clearing it once; at others, it was just a case of enjoying a story again, like re-reading a book or watching a film multiple times.

These days, meanwhile, there are so many games available that it’s relatively rare that I take the time to replay something I’ve already beaten to my satisfaction. But I made an exception for Final Fantasy VII Remake, so let’s take a look at that.

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Ace Attorney, Capcom

Ace Attorney: evolving the Japanese adventure game formula

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Playing through the two Famicom Detective Club games got me well and truly in the mood for some more adventuring. And so it was that I finally booted up the Nintendo Switch version of the first Ace Attorney Trilogy that I’ve had on my shelf for quite some time.

I’ve previously played all the Ace Attorney games except for the sixth one (and The Great Ace Attorney, and Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney… and the unlocalised second Ace Attorney Investigations game) so I already know the series quite well, but it’s been a good few years since I sat down and gave them some proper attention.

Moreover, I’ve somehow gone this long without ever writing about them here on MoeGamer, so today’s the day we fix that. Perhaps not for the last time, either.

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Final Fantasy VII Remake

Revisiting Final Fantasy VII Remake ahead of Rebirth’s release

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At the time of writing, we’re counting down to the long-awaited second part of the Final Fantasy VII Remake project, which we now know is called Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

That’s not all we know, in fact; we know that this second game is going to conclude in “The Forgotten Capital”, which is where the first disc of the original game ended. Yes, with that scene — though as we’ve previously discussed, Final Fantasy VII Remake took great pains to point out that “the future is a blank page”, and that game’s final encounter was literally facing down the concept of “Destiny” itself.

Anyway, long story short, I’ve been revisiting Final Fantasy VII Remake ahead of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s release, so I thought I’d talk a bit about my experiences so far.

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Famicom Detective Club

Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind – a truly compelling mystery

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The Famicom Detective Club games are something that I’d been meaning to get around to for a while, but have only just picked up. Having played through — and adored — first episode The Missing Heir, I was keen to follow that up with its prequel, The Girl Who Stands Behind.

Honestly, I was expecting more of the same, and to a certain extent that’s what you get with The Girl Who Stands Behind, at least in mechanical terms. From a narrative perspective, however, The Girl Who Stands Behind is arguably considerably more ambitious than its predecessor, and makes for a mystery even more compelling to unravel a bit at a time.

So let’s take a closer look at the 2021 remake from Nintendo and Mages, available as part of a double-pack with The Missing Heir — sadly, only digitally in its English language incarnation.

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Famicom Detective Club

Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir and the Japanese adventure game tradition

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Although Japanese-style adventure games are a bit of an acquired taste for some, I’ve become rather fond of the format over the years.

While the more “pure” visual novel format is considerably more commonplace these days, it does always make me smile when a new game comes out that makes use of those classic Japanese adventure game conventions rather than simply being “click to advance, perhaps with occasional choices”.

As such, I had been meaning to get around to the two Famicom Detective Club titles on Switch for quite some time. And, having played through the first of the duology, subtitled The Missing Heir, I feel compelled to talk about it at some length. So let’s do just that.

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Date A Live: Rio Reincarnation

Date A Live and the comforting familiarity of tropes

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“Tropes” has become a bit of a dirty word over the course of the last decade or so, for a variety of different reasons, but I’m here to present you with the not-terribly hot take that tropes exist for a reason, and that, when handled well, can enhance rather than detract from a creative work.

This particularly came to mind towards the end of last week, when I elected to finally pull down Date A Live: Rio Reincarnation from my shelf and make a start on it as one of my “things I’m playing that are not my current Big Game” titles to enjoy in the week.

As a visual novel, it’s something that can be enjoyed with minimal “effort”, and, as I’ve discussed in a few places before, it’s also ideally suited for things like reading in bed, accompanying mealtime or just generally zoning out in front of.

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Gaming on a Schedule

Gaming on a Schedule, Day 7: What have we learned?

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Today, according to my self-imposed schedule of video gaming fun times, was a “free choice”.

I spent most of it playing more Mary Skelter 2, so rather than bang on about that some more for now, I thought I’d reflect a bit on the week that has just gone by.

On the whole, I think this experiment has mostly been a success. I still have some lingering concerns about whether it is practical to apply this model when you’re playing very long games such as Mary Skelter 2, but I’ve managed to squeeze somewhere in the region of 15 hours of that game in this week across three days (one of which was just an evening) so I’m starting to think it might not be a problem.

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Gaming on a Schedule, Switch

Gaming on a Schedule, Day 6: More Mary Skelter 2

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And so, we return to my current “Big Game”: Idea Factory and Compile Heart’s excellent Mary Skelter 2, which I’ve been gradually ploughing through for quite some time now.

I really love dungeon crawlers. Something about the way they work just speaks to my brain. I think it’s the inherent satisfaction of gradually uncovering a map and discovering things.

In a good dungeon crawler, you’re always moving forwards and finding something new, and it’s satisfying to uncover a chunk of map even if all you discover is a complete dead-end.

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Gaming on a Schedule

Gaming on a Schedule, Day 5: A spot of retro chopper action

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I must confess, it was tempting to spend my entire “retro” evening playing more Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition because it’s technically not breaking any rules, but after making it through some exhaustingly tough levels, I felt like I needed a bit of a break! And so it was off to the “retro room” upstairs with me, to bust out something on a piece of real hardware.

I quickly settled on LHX Attack Chopper for Sega Mega Drive, a recent acquisition that I’ve long been curious about. There was a surprising number of polygonal flight sims on the Mega Drive — mostly distributed by Electronic Arts through their “EA Air Force” brand — and while I was never expecting them to match up to equivalent sims on home computers, I’ve always wanted to give them a go.

After trying LHX Attack Chopper for a bit this evening, I’m keen to pick up the others if I can find them for a reasonable price.

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Gaming on a Schedule

Gaming on a Schedule, Day 4: A fresh start with FFXIV

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I love Final Fantasy XIV. For a good few years, it devoured a significant part of my gaming time. In fact, the reason I stopped playing was primarily because it was taking up too much of my gaming time, and I wanted to be able to devote some time to other titles.

You could say that one of the chief motivators behind this Gaming on a Schedule experiment is the fact that for quite some time now, I’ve wanted to go back to playing Final Fantasy XIV, but in a way where it doesn’t dominate my entire gaming time, and where I can still enjoy other titles.

Other folks don’t seem to struggle with this too much, but I’ve had some difficulty.

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