Final Fantasy VII Remake Episode INTERmission: short and mostly sweet

February 13, 2024 Pete Davison Leave a comment

After clearing my Hard mode playthrough of Final Fantasy VII Remake, I was keen to try out “the Yuffie DLC”, also known as Episode INTERmission.

After my initial annoyance that Square Enix didn’t bother to include the damn DLC on the disc for the “Intergrade” PS5 version of Final Fantasy VII Remake — “Project Ten Dollar” is alive and well — I settled down to enjoy this additional episode, with absolutely no idea what to expect.

The entire thing took about 10 hours or so to play. You can extend that a fair bit if you do a Hard mode run through it and are a bit more fastidious about clearing up side activities, but the whole thing felt like it was a good length — and it left things on a nice teaser for Rebirth. So let’s take a closer look.

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Final Fantasy VII Remake

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

February 11, 2024 Pete Davison 1 Comment

“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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One-Shots

Is the desire to beat games a sunk cost fallacy?

February 6, 2024 Pete Davison 2 Comments

Full disclosure: I didn’t come up with this topic out of nowhere; it was inspired by seeing a recent Second Wind podcast which posed a similar question float across my YouTube feed.

I haven’t actually listened to the podcast in question as yet because I didn’t want to colour my own judgement on the topic; instead, I thought I’d just share my own personal feelings on the matter based on my own experiences and observations.

You probably already know what I’m going to say, given my track record here, but I think it might be an interesting discussion regardless. So let’s get into it!

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Ace Attorney, Capcom

Ace Attorney: evolving the Japanese adventure game formula

February 5, 2024 Pete Davison 1 Comment

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

February 4, 2024 Pete Davison 2 Comments

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

February 3, 2024 Pete Davison Leave a comment

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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One-Shots

Cataloguing the collection with Collectorz.com

February 2, 2024 Pete Davison Leave a comment

Since I started this site nearly ten years ago, my video game collection has expanded by a considerable degree.

It wasn’t necessarily a deliberate choice like “I want to become a video game collector”, but it did come about at least partially through regret over past trade-ins of titles that have subsequently become inordinately expensive, such as the PS1 version of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

We have reached a point, however, where my living room is an actual “games library”, and my wife has started suggesting that I might want to get the complete collection insured. Before I could look into that, though, I needed to catalogue the damn thing via some means…

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One-Shots, Switch

Another Code: Recollection – the way remakes should be

February 1, 2024 Pete Davison Leave a comment

The timing of Another Code: Recollection’s release — shortly after Sony’s hyped-up but completely superfluous and unnecessary The Last Of Us Part II Remastered — is kind of hilarious.

And this game starkly highlights the difference between (let’s not beat around the bush here) a cynical cash grab of a “remaster” and a full-on remake that brings an oft-forgotten game (or pair of games, in this case) to a whole new audience, divested of the less desirable aspects of the baggage that came with its original context.

Another Code: Recollection, in other words, is an excellent example of how to do a remake of a game. And whether or not you played the original Nintendo DS and Wii games in the series by the dearly departed developer Cing, it’s a very worthy use of your time to play the Switch version. So let’s take a closer look.

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Famicom Detective Club

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

January 31, 2024 Pete Davison 1 Comment

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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Announcements

A Re-Introduction

January 31, 2024 Pete Davison 1 Comment

Hello everyone! Apologies if you’ve been trying to reach the site for the last couple of days — I’ve been moving to new hosting as the site had pretty much outgrown the WordPress.com plan it was running on, and the two options were to pay through the nose for the next tier of WordPress.com plan, or move the whole site, which would be hassle but would ultimately future-proof everything a bit more. I went for the latter.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but never quite summoned up the energy to do so, but just recently I’ve been thinking that I fancied writing stuff a bit more regularly again, and so it seemed like a good time to do just that. Please let me know if you encounter any issues with the new site and I’ll do my best to fix them.

Why do I feel like writing again? Well, it’s a bit of a personal tale, but since you’re here, let’s overshare after the jump.

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The best of overlooked and underappreciated computer and video games, from yesterday and today.