I finally beat Final Fantasy VII Rebirth! It took me a grand total of 101 hours, and while I didn’t do absolutely everything in the game, I did a significant proportion of all the available stuff.
I enjoyed it a lot, overall. It’s a well-crafted game that pays nice homage to the original while doing a lot of new things that are distinctively its own. And while I won’t spoil the ending in this introduction, it was an intriguing and thought-provoking conclusion that we’ll talk a little more about later in this piece in a clearly spoiler-demarcated section.
So let’s have a look back over the game as a whole, and see what’s what, shall we?
Poor old Alone in the Dark has been through the wringer over the years.
First released on MS-DOS PC in 1992, it garnered critical acclaim for its innovative gameplay, presentation and wonderful atmosphere, and remains an essential play for anyone interested in the history of the survival horror genre. Without the original Alone in the Dark, we may not have had the Resident Evil series — at least not in the form it took in its early years.
Subsequent entries struggled to live up to the legacy of their predecessor, however… particularly when various companies attempted to “reboot” the franchise on several occasions in the intervening decades. But now Alone in the Dark is very much back on track, thanks to yet another reboot, this time developed by Pieces Interactive and published by THQ Nordic. Let’s take a closer look.
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.
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.
I am, as I have spoken about numerous times previously, not good at strategy games with a competitive component. But I have always enjoyed a distinct offshoot of the strategic genre: the management sim, in which you tend to mostly be competing against “yourself”.
Ever since I first played SimCity on Super NES — a game that I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy when I first got it for Christmas as a kid, but which I ended up loving — I’ve found great value from games where you get to “play God” to varying degrees, having the opportunity to express your creativity within the constraints of a set of game mechanics.
And the latest of these I’ve found myself having fun with is Sega’s Two Point Campus, the follow-up to their successful riff on Bullfrog’s Theme Hospital, Two Point Hospital.
