Attack on Titan (PS4): Simple but Effective.

I wasn't too late to the party when this anime started making some waves. I made the foolish mistake of watching the first episode of it right before bed, so that wasn't a smart move. But like so many people I loved the series and have been ravenously destroying the mangas as they have been released. I am very clearly a fan.

I had kept my eye on this one since its release last year. I saw a number of youtuber's stream their own let's plays of it throughout the year and it seemed fairly simple in its concept and really needed to execute on two major fronts. I had it on my xmas list this year but didn't get it, but I did have a good amount of Amazon credit after the holidays, so with a little extra spending money to burn I got myself a copy of....

ATTACK ON TITAN:(PS4)

The campaign mode of this game is generally condensed telling of season one of Attack on Titan but for those of you who do not know: over a century prior to the start of our story, humanity was attack by this species of gigantic humanoid monsters called Titans. They devoured humans on site maliciously and without mercy. Humanity was pushed near the edge of extinction forcing the remaining populous into a city protected by 3 massive walls, With royalty and the wealthy class in the center, and the poorer and downtrodden in the outer ring. For over 100 years, these walls protected humanity.

We take the perspective of Eren Yeager, his adoptive sister Mikasa Ackerman, and their friend Armin Arlert. Eren has a long standing desire to see the world beyond the walls, and quickly gets his wish as a massive 100 meter Titan looms over the walls and smashes through it, allowing smaller titans to invade the city. Thousands of lives are lost, and Eren loses his mother as she is eaten by a titan. Eren swears vengeance to kill all titans and joins the ranks of the military, with Mikasa and Armin in tow.

Five years pass and they work their way to cadets before deciding what sect of the military they are going to station to, with working omni-directional gear that is used to combat titans when the walls are attacked again by the colossal titan. With another opportunity to fight, Eren submits to his bloodlust and takes the fight to the titans.

Armin, Eren, and Mikasa

Now this is somewhat of a simplified summary of the basic events that get the game in motion, but I glossed over quite a bit. The game, in all honesty, kind of does as well as the cut-scenes between missions give us rather brief expositions of the story to transition us to the scenes that take us to the next mission. It's not a bad telling and if you have never seen Attack on Titan it will at least keep you up to speed, but if you are looking for the plot line, you really should watch the show.

Thankfully in my case, I didn't give a shit about the story development because I have seen it before. What I needed from this game was to be successful at two things and only two things. One: is it fun and fluid to fly around the city using the omni directional gear? And Two: is to fun to use said ability to fly around to kill big dumb derpy Titans? If this game succeeded on these two points, I would consider this a worthwhile purchase.

So lets start with moving around. There is a standard run and jump which you will use pretty much never. For some areas like open fields you can ride horseback, but 90% of the game will involve you using the Omni-direction mobility gear (or vertical maneuvering equipment, whatever). It works fairly simply enough, you tap the square/X to fire off an anchor for your gear, It doesn't need to aim so long as you are in high terrain, and it will immediately yank you up into the air. As long as have a visible anchor symbol, you can continue to press the anchor button and you will swing continually as long as the environment allows.

I should stress holding it is all you need to do, I was trying to time my presses and it was slowing me down. You can also use the jump button to fire a burst of gas from your tanks to increase you speed or keep you airborne if you are trying to jump a wide gap or something. For the most part it works pretty easily, and the only real problem comes in sometimes when you smack into the side of a building. It doesn't work exceptionally great for going straight up in the air.

Flying around the map is a joy to do. 

When approaching Titans to fight you will be able to switch from mobility mode to combat mode. Its more or less a lock on, and when you lock in on a target you are able to fire off anchors into them. This allows you to swing around your target, and more importantly allow you to get above them. Titans will usually have 5 targets on their knees, elbows, and nap of the neck. As we know, you can only KILL a titan by attacking the neck, but occasionally there material drops in the arms and legs, so its wise to try to farm that when you have the chance.

Battle is somewhat straightforward as well. Once you are anchored onto your target, you can flip between the targets and re-anchor at will. As long as you are moving the analogs you will continue to shift your position and it will let you know about how far away from the titan you are. If you let go of the analog your ODG will start to reel your in towards the titan. Upon getting in range you can tag the triangle/Y to make an attack. You need to speed to really deal damage so you want to start from far enough away that you can build speed before the strike. Otherwise you'll need to use a burst of gas or you'll fudge the attack.

Flying with the anchors in combat can be finicky when doing it in close quarters or when fighting multiple titans. A titan will never trip up themselves or you on an anchor attacked to them, but if you swing and cross through a tree, building, or another titan the line will snap and you'll need to re-anchor. And these pricks will trip up your line and try to grab you a lot, so be ready for it.

Every single kill you make in the game is immensely satisfying.

Generally, when going through the game either in the story mode or online mode, you will enter a location with a main objective. You could dash right to the objective and take it down, but you will usually get a pretty shitty ranking for that. While traveling the map you will that other characters will be on the map and they may be in trouble. There are various side objectives that these characters are doing (like killing titans, defending a point, escorting someone to saftey) and you can go to help them to keep them alive. If you do, chances are you will gain better materials and they will assist you in the fights for the rest of the level.

Yes, you aren't fighting alone. There are a number of varied survey corps members around as well as main characters. Each of these have a rank of effectiveness so naturally you'll want to help your teammates to get better support. For characters like Armin and Hange, who have the ability to control their teammates attacks, its almost crucial because it basically gives you a series of homing shots. 

Characters have abilities that develop as you level them. I mentioned strategists like Armin and Hange who have abilities that keep them safer in battle from a distance, but then you have heavies like Mikasa or Levi who can pretty much yo-yo themselves for multiple attacks, which allows them to bring down titans faster than other characters, There are also characters who are better at resource collecting. The story mode lets you run through a majority of these characters so you can get a feel for who you like when you go into online mode.

As you might have guessed, Levi is the most busted character in the game.

And for those who watched the show or read the manga before hand? Yes you will have segments where using a titan will be in play. But I'll be 100% honest with you? This is probably the most boring aspect of the game. You can run at speeds and slug it out and throw other titans, but it just feels like it turns into a regular brawler. A regular old brawler is not why I am here.

Lastly, as I've mentioned there is materials you get during missions. This is what allows you to upgrade your ODG or swords. There isn't a whole world of difference between the main types of gear. For swords do you want range, power, or capacity/durability. For ODG do you want speed, Range, strength, and capacity. Honestly, I found it best to just keep upgrading the standard gear because they were the most balanced, but if you dabble further into the online scout mode, you'll need to tailor your gear for harder missions.

In online, multiple players can use the same character.
So if you wanted 4 titans to play the game in boring mode, you could.

It should also be noted that your gear isn't indefinite. There is degradation to your primary equipment, namely the amount of swords you have to use, how long they last, and how much pressure you have to air dash around. There are scouts littered across the map that you can stop at for a quick re-supply, but with the right equipment I've found that this rarely is an issue. You also have the ability to trigger a decisive battle which will give you increased attack, and small boost to your gear.

The Scout Mode is more or less the online version of the game. You can continue to play increasingly challenging missions for more supplies and experience as well as a mod where you can scout multiple missions in a row. Whats nice about this is you have the freedom to choose what character of the majority of the cast you'd like to use. So when I played online, it was a lot of Eren's, Mikasa's, and Levi's. I was constantly hunting for materials so I often used Christa, which seemed to annoy most of the groups I played with because she is probably the weakest character in the game.

A weird thing about the online mode of the game is I was under the assumption that the party/room leader was who got to selection missions. I had this one asshole invade one of my games, My room was set that I was clearly focusing on missions at this level of difficulty, and after doing one of them this prick would go into the mission NPC, change my mission to a different mode entirely and then ready immediately, thus locking the mission in place and not allowing it to be changed. It was fucking annoying and I had to kick him because it was my room.

Because you are a chump, Armin. Grow a pair and fight like everyone else is.

I find the soundtrack to this game to be simultaneously great and generic at the same time. This is something the Tales Of series tends to struggle with. They managed to produce this epic sounding score that feels great when you are battling titans or flying around, but if you asked me to hum a few notes of my favorites, I couldn't do it because its all utterly forgettable. I honestly don't know how this is possible but its surprisingly common it feels like.

Graphically I guess you could say its got kind of a washed out cell shading to it? I don't know how to describe it but its something about the grittiness of how the characters are animated makes them contrast sharply to the backdrop and environment around them it works to make the characters pop in their otherwise grimy surroundings.

Using your decisive flare can get you out of pinch or give that last push on a hard titan 

The game honestly could have tooled with the upgrade and progression system somewhat. It feels like hunting for supplies is always a chore and if you are playing online good luck trying to get people to help you do it. You have to clear as many as you can as fast as you can to really get A and S ranks on your missions and most people just dash to the finish and kill the boss. You'll get C's for that. It causes you to miss out on a lot of bonus supplies for equipment that honestly is only marginally better than what you are using. Expect to be checking back a lot.

And one can argue that the game is incredibly repetitive. The real meat and potatoes of the game will be you flying around on the ODG in massive open environments around swarms of titans. The only things that break the pace are the few missions where you actually get to control a titan, but as I've said earlier, doing so takes away from what I feel is the fun part of the game. So yeah, not a whole lot of real variance to the game from the start to the finish. The biggest challenge really is learning its somewhat awkward controls. Even once you beat the story, the online missions are basically variants of story missions with slightly changing difficulty.

Not unless you are playing with friends, Hange.

But you know what? I played this game for HOURS. Went completely through the story mode, hopped online and did a bunch of missions with some random strangers, and I almost never got tired of flying around and hacking away at titans. The increasing difficulty of the missions some how did just enough to really keep me engaged with this game for a lot longer than it should of. Leveled up a bunch of characters and pretty much kept playing it till something new came out.

So I consider this worth the purchase I paid for it. It goes on sale often and will probably be looking a price drop sooner than later, so for what its worth I enjoyed Attack on Titan. While it might not be the most developed and fleshed out game to ever come out, I said at the onset that it had to do two things right and on that front it most certainly succeeds. If you are a fan of the series Attack on Titan will provide you with a fun experience, just don't expect to probably come back to it after you've moved on to something else.

I seriously don't get why the show is deviating from the manga for season 2.
That story is so friggen good.

The Witch and the Hundred Knight (PS4): A very Disgaea take on Zelda.

Since I no longer work at Gamestop (thank god), I don't have the luxury of getting to try things before I buy them anymore. I sometimes check redbox to see what they have on hand, but some of the things I spy on aren't available. As luck would have it, some of my my neighboring libraries have much better video game budget than the one I work at and have a pretty new and put to date selection of gamery to pick from.

This one I had seen for a while, but I never jumped on because Nippon Ichi software can be a real hit or miss for any game that isn't Disgaea. Sometimes I've gotten burned on them, sometimes I've found a gem that ended up being underrated. But I'm a sucker for anything kinda anime RPGish so since I had the ability to play this for weeks for free, I took a stab at....

THE WITCH AND THE HUNDRED KNIGHT:(PS4)

(Played in 2016)

In this adventure we are set in the world of Medea, your prototypical fantasy realm that is just on the verge of some technological advancement. In this realm exists a large, but incredibly toxic swampland that is surrounded by forested area. Within this swamp resides Metallia, and arrogant, cocky, and downright mean woman with her robotic servant Arlecchino. 

Metallia is a self proclaimed Swamp Witch and although she is not recognized in any official capacity by the realm's other witches, she is fiercely powerful and practically bursting with magical potential. She has been at war with the forest witch at her borders, but Metallia has one major weakness in that she physically cannot leave her swamp without becoming severely weakened. So to combat this, she summons a small familiar she believes to be the Legendary Hundred Knight (you) to swing the battle in her favor. Despite being smaller and weaker than she believed, she sets him out upon the world to find a series a pillars that will allow her to spread her swamp, and thus her ability extend her reach and power upon the world.

So I'm not gonna lie. Despite being a protagonist? Holy shit Metallia might be one of the villainous characters in a game. Now I know that Nippon Ichi does a pretty good job of weaving a tale despite managing to be pretty tongue and cheek with its story, but it was incredibly hard to get into the role of working for Metallia because she quite literally has zero emotional compass. She lashes out with vulgarity, violence, and unfiltered fury, (a girl after my own heart really.).

But you don't actually ever really play as Metallia. You control the Hundred Knight, You are given the option to give your character a name in the onset of the game, but Metallia promptly ignores it. Throughout the story you get the choice to make a couple of decisions to either agree, disagree, ignore or question something you've been told, but from what I understand there are only a few crucial decisions that can really effect the ending of the game. So in my playthrough of the game, I found myself questioning everything I was told because despite being on Metallia's side, I found her reasoning for things questionable.

The visual novel story elements are in place, as is standard for most NIS titles.
From what I know, we never get this question answered.

So I expected this game to be a JRPG or some kind of tactical RPG because that tends to be Nippon Ichi's entire wheelhouse, but surprisingly it ended up being a top down action adventure game. As cheekily described by article title, The gameplay of this game feels reminiscent of the classic of the traditional Legend of Zelda series or the original Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. Top down, hero center, slash baddies. Generally the objectives are a simple get to the other end of the level. You don't have to do it in one go but the end mission rewards tend to be better if you do. But as you travel you will continually bust open pillars that allow you to return to base and cash in on the XP you've earned to that point.

Now it wouldn't be very Nippon Ichi if they didn't take a relatively simple system and over-complicate it. So generally your weapons follow a kind of rock paper scissors system to them. They vary between slashing weapons, smashing weapons, and magic weapons. Typically these fall swords, hammers, and staves, but the thing to really make a note of while you play is what type of damage the weapons do. For example you might find axes instead of hammers which are still super slow and damaging, but do slashing damage instead of smashing. So if an enemy is completely immune to slashing damage, your shiny new axe amounts to jack shit.

You can equip up to three different weapon sets so you basically get a 5 combo attack based on your varied weapons so you can focus one type of damage, or mix and match if you like. But from my experience most of the baddies of an area usually all have similar damage resistances per area so I found it most effective to set each set to a specific damage type. In addition to this, most items are marked with a 1-5, so as long as you have your weapons placed in numerical order, you will get an increasing damage buff per swing. You are going to be flooded with gear often, so make sure you go through and makes sure you have the best stuff equipped at all times.

But because of the nature of the Hundred Knight's summon, you only get so much time away from Metallia, so every level is timed more or less by this Giga calorie system. How it works is you have a counter on the top of the screen counting down from 100. It decreases faster as you recharge your stamina, use specials, run, or take excessive damage. It constantly depletes to heal you so you have to pay attention to it because if it drops to zero you have significantly reduced stats. There are multiple ways to restore it such as using your bonuses received from smashing baddies to restore it at pillars along the map you uncover, eating food items, or eating baddies on the screen (yes, you can eat enemies).

There is a limited amount of space for the rewards you get, since Hundred Knight isn't the smartest thing in the world, he eats them to keep them safe till he gets back to Metallia. So the loot you collect is stored in his stomach. You only get so much space in your stomach and you lose it even faster if you eat enemies, so when your stomach gets full you have to use a Bowel Dump to get the garbage out of your stomach. (I am not making this up, god I wish I was. -_-)

NIS's knack for hilarious flavor text is prevalent in this game as well.

You also as you play along the game start to gather various familiar summons for you to use in the levels. These vary in use to helping you in battle, destroying obstacles to allow you to continue, triggering far away switches, or utterly decimating bosses. Most of these I found myself not using unless the level required me to use one to proceed. The main exception was the trapper which sometimes net some interesting items of upgrade or sale. It wasn't till the end where I got this massive Tower summon that I could drop two off that fired off homing magic shots. Since magic is the hardest attack attribute to deal damage with, these were game breaking.

There is also a job class system sort of. Hundred knight will unlock about 8 different attack styles or classes that will affect your base stats and also provide different effects. Honestly the one your start off with is your most basic and balanced so I found little reason to switch off of it at any point. You can also set two sub categories for additional boosts at reduced experience, so its always good to have multiple set. I tended to prefer the Ninja class because it basically let me continue to run at incredibly reduced stamina and Gcal depletion. Cap it off with another attack or defense for your 3rd and you have a pretty solid build for most of the game. If it stops working switch them up or go to an older level land grind some of the others.

Ninja and Wonder Knight were staples, The third can fluctuate as needed.

These might have been more effective than I gave credit for, but I rarely used them.

Following its Disgaea lineage, TW&THK also features its own Item world of sorts in some kind of alternate reality rouge-like tower. It features a story of the characters you've met so far but in some form of alternate timeline/reality version of them. It's the only place where you actually get to play as Metallia as some kind of last ditch summon for big damage, but given the item I sacrificed to get in there all of the baddies in there for like 50 floors were completely piss weak. The main reason to go in here is this is the location where you can get materials to upgrade your items and weapons at the shops outside the tower. I literally didn't figure out this out until near the end of the game, and it doesn't really do a whole lot to explain it to you. It would have really come in handy for some of the later stages.

There is also a karma mechanic in the game as well that primarily comes from trying to take over NPCs homes for bonus items. If the karma meter gets too high NPCs will get hostile and try to kill you. They never do much damage, but you can't harm them so you'll need to go back to base to reduce your karma. It's not really a difficult thing to manage so there is little real effect to it that I found.

At the level of difficulty the tower I was in, I never really needed to summon Lia.

That is more or less of the core mechanics of the game. Despite all the additional mechanics this game tends to throw at you, its play tends to be pretty straight forward for the most part and the mild confusion at new controls are worked through relatively quickly. There is one level where you can smash baddies in groups of 6, so grinding for levels never really ended up being a problem, and the game as a meaty play to time to it. For most of its primary functions it has solid mechanics.

Graphically, and this comes as somewhat of a surprise to me, TW&THK is rendered with 3d models which I've found Nippon Ichi to rarely do. They aren't really fantastically rendered models and this was PS3 game so I'm willing to give somewhat of a pass on it, but they still don't look too great. usually though the camera is so far away from the models that you really don't get a sense of the level of detail for them anyways.  Story segments are done in the traditional visual novel style of gameplay this producer has stuck to for most of their games.

Sad this is, this isn't even as close to as bad as this game can get.

Speaking of, MAN some of the story segments of this game can get fucking wordy. Because of the very tongue and cheek nature of the writing, some of it can be pretty hilarious but some of the exposition seems to drag on for what feels like forever. This is exceptionally bad at the onset of new chapters. I have had live streams where if I let the dialogue run until it was completely spoken no joke some of these segments can go up to 30 minutes.

Another ridiculous thing TW&THK does is for some stupid reason, the game rolls the credits after you complete each individual chapter of the game. Thankfully its skippable, but for the life of me I cannot understand whey the developers felt that I needed to see it between each chapter. Perhaps they felt that this game was going to bomb so they wanted to make sure the credits got seen at least once before the player eventually quit. Or perhaps they felt they did such a great job with that text roll they thought it was the most enjoyable experience of the game. It's completely stupid and I have no idea why they did it this way.

The cast of characters for the most part generally likable. Although admittedly it might take a little warming up to some of them, I don't think there was a character I liked from the moment they were introduced in the game but as I played through a chapter or two I needed up liking them a little more as I understood them. The only character who I really struggled to like through a good portion of the game was Metallia herself because she's such a rotten bitch. For an early spoiler, in the 2nd chapter f the game she does defeat the forest witch, but as she's weakened the forest witch exclaims not to kill her because she is actually Metallia's mother.

Metallia's response to this basically equivalates to a "So fucking what? Who cares?" and places a hex on her. Not just a normal hex though, she felt the best way to curse her mother was to turn her into a mouse, jack up her pheromone production to 11 and the summon 3 large horny rats so her mother can give her "lots of brothers and sisters." God fucking damn, Metallia, jeeze... To be fair, the game does have that moment where it boomerangs and I suddenly wanted Metallia to get her way and fucking kill everyone, and I felt it does an adequate job of explaining her selfish nature. I give Nippon Ichi this, they are always good at weaving a tale.

Remember kids, this is the story's "heroine". Not the villain... maybe.

The hands down biggest complaint I have with this game is that the camera and its controls suck an entire bushel of weewees. The camera spin is incredibly slow, and you can only raise and lower the angle of it so much, so it always feels like the camera is too close to the action and is never really positioned in a way that you can easily see what is coming. On top of that, the fucking environments are always in the fucking way. So if you are going to be exploring a set of forest or a town with really tight alleyways? You get to eat shit. Enjoy looking at the tops of trees or buildings as enemies you can't see wail on you. Its retarded. There should be no reason I can't pan the camera higher up to get a better lay of the land in this style of play.

One last niggling complaint that I have is this game is very unclear about the process of getting the proper endings. There are 3 possible ones. One of them is Meh and its made by a very simple decision near the end of the game, where you basically have deny a mission 3 times to which you get a pretty shitty monologue. I youtube'd that one. The next ending is the "true ending" which might have been one of the shittest unfulfilling things I've ever seen. I was legitimately pissed because while it is an ending epilogue, its a real "Ha ha, fuck you". To get the best experience, you have to get the "bad ending" which is done by finding and defeating 3 optional bosses in levels you have previously gone through. The game does little to indicate this so I ended up missing them completely. There is a surprisingly little amount of online guide for this game.

That being said, after I was done with initial checkout of this game, I looked around to see that it was dropped to 20 bucks new at some stores. This is because its out of print so I had a agent further out into the state get me a copy of the game because I prefer the physical. I enjoyed it that much that I felt I needed to own it so I can finish it at my leisure. I still haven't completed the bad ending yet but I do intend to. I could absolutely sit down with this game for another 20 hours or so, but it is possible to get all 3 endings if you saved in the right places on a single run. It's not a very difficult game.

Every so often, one of these prolific companies that pump out games will release an underrated nugget that is worth playing. I definitely feel that The Witch and the Hundred Knight falls under that category. It's certainly not a game without its flaws and I wouldn't blame anyone who put this game down because of the tone of the narrative or wonkiness of some of the mechanics. It doesn't do anything to break the mold but it was a enjoyable game to play and it did enough to make me feel I needed to own it. From what I've heard there is a sequel in the works so perhaps they can polish this up somewhat. This one is hard to find physically but is still available digitally so if you are looking for something that's a little different yet familiar with a story that doesn't take itself too seriously, I would say its worth a play.

Seriously, Metallia should have killed everyone at Walpurgis. 

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (PS4) - All Shook Up

So one of the big swings since the advent of this current generation of consoles is we've kind of veered away from the modern shooter and developers have taken a renewed look at the horror genre and when games like Outlast and P.T. got released people really started to focus on the the first person horror game. With the development and releases of VR headsets this seemed like a natural progression of the genre.

Which is what makes this newest installment of this series so interesting. Now this is a mainstay of the survival horror genre dating back to the early stages of the playstation one. It practically invented the entire genre, the problem is when you get to this high of a number of sequels to the game things have to change to keep it fresh. They didn't with the sixth game, and it was roundly bashed for it. This demo was released and displayed that Capcom was going to indeed change everything up and take the series in a new direction. So after months of waiting, its time to dive back into the world of.....

RESIDENT EVIL 7: BIOHAZARD(PS4)

We start off with a completely new story. We open of from the perspective of someone watching videos on a laptop, we are introduced to a somewhat bubbly woman named Mia sending a message to her husband Ethan. She is on a work trip and apparently has been away for a while, all she leads on is that she is on some kind of babysitting project and can't wait to get home. After the video ends, our POV opens up another video. Mia is clearly panicked, exhausted, and scared. She exclaims to Ethan that she lied, and that she's sorry. But if he manages to receive this video to stay away.

Three years pass, and we take perspective of Ethan. He's driving from Texas to Louisiana. During the drive he takes a call and explains that he received an email from Mia telling him to come get her at this farm. Ethan doesn't know if its true, but he hasn't seen his wife in 3 years. He has to go and find out the truth, why Mia was gone for so long. And as Ethan approaches where the farmhouse is, that's where we take control of the game. (Outside of these characters, I am going to avoid mentioning other characters to avoid spoilers).

Not the most optimistic start to our adventure.

So I have to give Capcom some credit here. Not only did they completely shake up how we play Resident Evil but they also went out of the way to give us a completely original and new story. when you start playing you have none of the established characters, locations, or back lore to worry about. For a new player this would be an inviting change because you don't need to feel lost trying to learn Resident Evil's ridiculous and convoluted story structure.

Resident Evil has always been a series that managed to produce fear and tension because of a combination of things that kept you at a disadvantage. Namely its a relatively slow rate of movement, minimal weaponry to use against relentless enemies, scarce ammo for said weapons to use, and tight claustrophobic environments. Since Resident Evil 4 the areas started to widen out, the game got faster, and you had weapons to keep up a frenetic pace. For the initial shake up it was great but after 4 they became to feel cookie cutter and generic, hence the lambasting of 6 by most gamers.

Meet Lucas, Jack, and Marguerite Baker. The friendly southern family who will host our adventure.

Resident Evil 7 has decided to re-embrace these core roots, and felt the best way to shake up the dynamic is to take away the established 3rd person convention and go first person. The demo, Resident Evil: Beginning Hour, was indicative of this change. This from a control perspective feels like a blend of the horror walking simulators a la Outlast and Layers of Fear but unlike most of those there is some mild first person shooter mechanics which allow you to defend yourself.... Somewhat.

Basic controls are simple and natural at this point. Right trigger to shoot, Left trigger to aim. Analog controls to move and spin the camera. Click in the analogs to run and crouch. Triangle for the menu, Dpad for the hot keys. If you have a played a video game at all in the past 20 something years nothing about this control scheme should throw you a curve ball. 

I will say that there was one mistake I consistently made, and continue to make every time I play the game is that the right bumper is a hotkey to use one of your medical bottles. And without fail, every time while scrambling around for the menu or something I will tap that damn button and waste a healing item at full health. Can game developers please just put in a mechanic where you can't use health items at max heath for idiots like me?

While the melee combat feels loose and wild, it certainly adds a visceral aesthetic.

The game tries to strike a balance of creating tension while at the same time being fair in its regards to item use. Most of the time, you would be wandering around the house looking for items to break open or find. Bullets rarely come in groups bigger than 5 or so and there are not very many easy to kill enemies. So as you play through its a matter of making every shot count. You are given a melee weapon in the early stages of the game, but its just a pocket knife. This weapon is beyond useless. Its really meant for breaking open boxes and nothing else, because fighting with this thing in this game is a death wish.

While we are on the subject of fighting, There is a new mechanic I wasn't used to and that is the addition of a block button. While you have firearms to use, most of your enemies are all melee attackers and getting hit by them will deal massive damage. So with a quick press of the left bumper Ethan throws his arms up to absorb the brunt of the blow. Not getting used to using this is probably why I struggled at the early stages of this game. There are some points and enemies where using this ability is absolutely critical to get down or you will find yourself repeating the same fight over any over again.

I struggled at the onset because I grossly underestimated the importance of blocking.

Another nod to the traditional Resident Evil convention is the crafting mechanic returns as well. As you search around the house you will find items that by themselves are not particularly useful but when combined with chemical packs you find around the house you can create more ammo or healing items. As a chicken shit, I erred on the side of safety and made sure that I always had 3 health bottles in my inventory at all times.

It's also worth noting that there are a handful of weapons that you just cannot make ammo for, so be sure to make a note of that because those are the weapons that you need to hang on to to get you through some of the tougher scrapes of the game. This is primarily for two weapons specifically: The shotgun which is going to be your primary heavy for group fights. If you are fending off more than one enemy or something you are sure you can't take down with a pistol, and M44 Handgun which basically replaces the magnum. Ammo is next to non-existent so I'd hang onto this for the final boss like I did.

Fuckin'..... No thank you.

On the other hand though, if you use up all your ammo in every encounter you are going to find yourself without a bullet left to spend when you really need it. So sometimes it is better to just run and hide. A lot of the enemies won't open doors so you have that working to your advantage, and some enemies are nearly impossible to put down, so if you would want to survive, you'll need to pick your battles and use your environment to your advantage. 

So again, credit where it is due to Capcom on this one. This has completely shaken up the Resident Evil formula. Is it a new experience? Not as such but, but I do applaud the company for looking at what people didn't like about the last game, and decided to make some drastic changes to the formula to try to breathe new life into the franchise. It's a bold gambit to make but after Resident Evil 6 it looks like it was the smart play. Reviews of this one have been generally positive.

Interestingly though, while there are a few little nods to the Resident Evil franchise as a whole throughout the whole game, such as some sound effects and the saving/storage system, this game honestly could have been delivered as a new property entirely. There is very little connection to the Resident Evil as a whole. Like for example, if they just decided that this was going to be the first new installment of the Beginning Hour series or whatever, It might have actually been better received because it didn't have to contend with the lineage before it.

Backpacks are super important in this game so don't miss them.
Even with them you will be shuffling your inventory a lot.

Graphically this game is fairly impressive at points and sometimes less impressive in others. The whole game runs at a seamless 60fps so everything is smooth. It is clear this is a well motion captured game because all the movement and reactions of the characters feel realistic and natural. But inversely, and I don't know why this is, Any motion captured game always seems to have really awkward fake looking teeth. If you played through Until Dawn or Heavy Rain you know exactly what I am talking about. I also feel that some of the background elements don't seem as detailed as the could be, but its a dark dirty dingy house so I don't know what I really am asking for here. Nothing of it was jarring or so poor that it took me out of the game.

The sound design of this game is your pretty typical horror fanfare. Droning horror noises sparsed out by footsteps and uncomfortable silences. The voice action is pretty on point where none of dialogue feels hokey or cheesy. It definitely has the proper horror movie style score to set the scenes or kick in in moments of tension or battle. The tutorial boss fight is actually one of the best examples of this which I actually don't want to get into, because it was one of the best parts of the game. But the pièce de résistance is the opening song from the trailer, which is a modified cover of the folk song "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" by Burl Ives. It's just perfect and makes the intro movie perfectly haunting.

The tension aspect that they really wanted to push in this one is reminiscent of Resident Evil 3, because while the monsters won't open doors, that's not going to stop the family that is in the house and actively looking to hurt you.  They are relentless pursuers and will absolutely mess you up if they get their hands on you and you don't have that block mechanic down.

Unfortunately, this leads to my biggest problems with the game and surprisingly its because of the Auto-save, but not for the reasons that you might think. At the start of the game after a brief bit of walking around the farmhouse we actually step right back into the Beginning Hour demo. Everything felt familiar but since it was this was the actual game I knew something had to be different. What followed was a tense creeping through the house jumping at every sound effect which was followed by a terrifying close quarters fight defending only with a hand axe vs a chainsaw. Totally on the edge of my seat, this was great.

You will find Jack to be somewhat of a stubborn individual.

But in a later segment, I had some bullets and keep trying to progress through the underside of the house and I came to this hallway where I would have fight 3 monsters. I didn't have the block just down yet and I was getting destroyed. I would back up, fire my gun, take my lumps, take a few steps forward and get trashed by the next one. But after I while, I realized that the auto-save was keeping me pretty much right in front of the door where these fights started, so I could just let myself get killed and I'd be right back in the fray with all my health and ammo.

And that's the problem. Now I wasn't playing to survive, I was playing to get past this part. Now I wasn't getting tense or scared, I was getting frustrated. This was the issue I had with games like Bioshock and Outlast. When you have an auto-save system that holds your hand and gives you a minor slap on the wrist, you basically have taken away any sense of risk. Sure, the jump scares would still get me, but now I would approach new areas with much more reckless abandon because now I understood there was little penalty for failure. 

In the older Resident Evils at least up to the first 4, if you were down to critical health, knew you hadn't saved in an hour or two, and only had one first aid spray back in the safe room? That slow trek back would be fucking terrifying because you knew if you blew it you had to make all that progress all over again if a zombie or hunter took you. Sure, it might be easier the 2nd time around but not getting your save in time is what added a tangible penalty to your progress. So the tension would be through the roof. Even more so if you were slogging through a new area and didn't know if a safe room or healing item was on the way.

That's sadly what Resident Evil 7 lacks. It's not scary. It can be intense and it has jump scares, but its not the same thing. I sort of realized this when I played Beginning Hour earlier last year. They tried to do the cerebral horror thing but I found just not getting scared by the demo. So much like when I played Outlast, the moment I realized I wasn't set back I wasn't scared anymore. I know that Auto save to a degree is something we all enjoy and something feel we need to have, but in games like this it undermines the very theme its based around.

Now originally I had written some ideas to perhaps address these issues, but from what I'm being told is that if you beat the game, when you play it on the "Madhouse" difficulty it really goes back to some of the series more notable roots. Namely, saving your game becomes limited by collecting cassette tapes (much like the old ink ribbons of older Resident Evils), the auto-save triggers less, less ammo to find, and its shuffles the items and adds more monsters on top of them being harder. This is all great and probably exactly what this game needed, I just don't like that you have to beat through the game once to do it. It should be an available option from the onset, RE classic mode or something.

Cassette Tapes replace Ink Ribbons for save points. So another dated piece of
technology kids don't know what the hell it is. RE 8 will save with 3.5 Floppies.

I was happy to see when I beat it I would be getting free DLC later. Saw it and was like "Well that's good news, good on you Capcom," and then quite literally within the week of its release they released at DLC pack for an additional 10 dollars for a survival mode, and two other mini modes. Immediately then I was like. "Oh, right. Capcom." They've fucking pulled this shit before, so I don't know why it surprised me now.

The last issue I can think of really, is something that eluded to above and it's that this game could simply not be a Resident Evil game. There are a bunch of little homages and some story nods to the classic series, but outside of one real critical story moment it could have been called literally anything else and been a starting point for a brand new property. Honestly, if was called something else entirely I would have probably looked upon it even more favorably because I would be judging it completely on its own merit, without having to compare to what came before. Bravely Default did this: it's clearly a classic Final Fantasy but they didn't call it that, and it felt new a different because of it.

But while these problems exist, I wouldn't go as far to say that makes Resident Evil 7 a bad experience. Actually, pretty far from it. While the intensity and scariness definitely dissipates after the first hour of the game, there is certainly a fun factor to it that made it incredibly hard to put down. I had it finished in almost two sittings at just under 10 hours, and that first night I ended up going to bed 3 hours after I wanted to because I wanted to see what was behind that door now that I had the key to open it. Or solve this one last puzzle. It kept me engaged and that ultimately is the sign of a good game.

And Resident Evil 7 is a good game. In fact its probably a great game. I went through my initial play-through in about 10 hours or so, and now I learning there are more unlockables if you get it under 4 hours so I'm playing it again on easy. This is something I haven't done since like Resident Evil 3. I won't go as far to say its the greatest of the series, and I certainly won't back off saying the game is not scary because I don't feel it is. But this shake up was exactly what the series needed to breathe new life into it, and they managed to keep some of the aspects that make it FEEL like a  Resident Evil game without it aping off the convoluted lore it set before it.

In my review of Resident Evil 6 I lamented that I felt Capcom lost their way with this franchise. This feels like an attempt to find it, or at the very least make it something new. I would play another game like this one. I think with a few tweaks it could be even better. Resident Evil 7 is absolutely worth a play.

This game honestly could have been directed by Rob Zombie.

Final Fantasy XV(PS4): An enjoyable Bro'd trip.

Sighs.... OK Final Fantasy. We've been doing this dance for what feels like 20 something years at this point. You've been my favorite series once, it's been well established that I feel you were at your best with six and ten, and you certainly didn't do yourself any favors continually cramming Lightning down my throat. It took you 3 tries to get that right. So now I read that the whole company is putting everything into making this installment a success, everything I saw at first did not lead me positively. Four dudes driving around a car in what seems to be just a Final Fantasy version of the midwest? Eh....

But then something kinda clicked while I was fiddling with one of the two demos that got released. For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to see a JRPG that kept the kinda of fantasy monsters and themes, but kept it in a contemporary setting. Well, this is as close to that as I've gotten so far that I can remember, so with renewed energy I sat down with....

FINAL FANTASY XV(PS4)

(played in 2016)

So I won't lie, Final Fantasy XV's story is a bit of a muddled mess. SquareEnix seems to be determined to make their story as confusing as possible. So much so that it is actually recommended to watch the Final Fantasy XV movie Kingsglaive prior to the playing the game. It gives a little more context to what it happening in the world of this game, but ultimately you will want to keep to some basic points to help move you along.

You play as Noctis, the heir to the throne of Lucis, a small kingdom in the world of Eos. Lucis is bustling empire which contains a magical artifact known as the Crystal, a gift bestowed by the deities of this world, and is controlled via a ring passed down through the royal family. Lucis has been at a constant war with the neighboring technological and militaristic empire of Niflheim which controls most of Eos, but they have called a armistice with the condition that Noctis marries his childhood friend and destined oracle Lunafreya.

However, as Noct and his crew travel to Accordo to reunite with Lunafreya for the wedding, it is shown (or known if you watched Kingsglave) that this was just the set up for a double cross. Lucis is attacked, the city is heavily damaged, Noct's father is killed, the crystal is stolen, and he and Lunafreya are presumed dead. With no other course of action other than the press on as the current last of the line of Lucis bloodline, Noct sets out to find Lunafreya, retrieve the weapons of the Ancient Lucian Kings and inherit the powers of the Lucian line, and retrieve the crystal back from the empire.

Ok, Prince goes to get revenge, take what is stolen, and get the girl. That's where our head needs to be because even for a Final Fantasy game they managed to weave an incredibly confusing plot. I will say that watching Kingsglaive helped with that, but there is really little reason that couldn't have just been in the game instead of as a stand alone movie. Perhaps because the film doesn't really even contain Noctis and therefore might be considered vestigial, but perhaps if you controlled Lunafreya in these segments it would have made more sense and fleshed the story about better. The demos could have probably been crammed in here too.

So while Final Fantasy has gone through a number of different iterations, but at its core it has always been a JRPG or a variant of it. Well, after numerous attempts to squash the JRPG out of the the game, Final Fantasy XV succeeds by more or less completely removing the menu based elements out of the game. Now we have almost and Auto-fight version action based of Kingdom Hearts, its designed to be both simple, skillful, and seamless all at once, and I'll be damned if it doesn't actually work pretty well.

There is no combat transitions like the Final Fantasy of old. As you wander near enemies and they become hostile the weapons pop out and you are immediately in the fray. Combat is primarily controlled by a number of button holds. If you hold your standard attack, Noctis will continue to wail on the baddie you are trained on for as long as you MP holds up, chipping a little away with each attack. If you use your Warp, you can fling your weapon for a heavier teleport strike as well as use this to leap to cover to restore you spent MP.

The combat feels fluid and fun, so despite simple controls it still feels skillful.

You also have a defense button, where if held Noct will shiftstep to avoid incoming attacks, and if held in the right moments can initiate a parry for Noct to counter and strike back for bigger damage. As you take damage, you lose HP, if you are brought down to critical, you can start to lose your maximum HP, which can really make the battles a slog to get through.

Then there are a handful of other fight mechanics to help make things easier as well. You have a pair of gauges that charge up as you deal damage. One of them is your team up gauge where you can expend 1 to 3 bars with your individual party members for a team attack, but once you learn Ignus's regroup you have little reason to use anything else because it warps everyone to him and restores everyone to near full health. You have a gauge around your weapons that when activated puts you in what I call a frenzy mode, where Noct just goes ham with the ancient weapons he's found while taking next to no damage, and can be finished with a 4 member team attack. Finally there are summons, where in this Final Fantasy they are fight enders. Almost nothing survives a cast summon. The problem is I've yet to figure out what things need to happen to actually activate a summon, so when the music changes and the prompt appears, just hit it and finish the fight.

So long as you can hold out in a fight, Ramuh will eventually finish it for you.

Items for the most part don't change in this Final Fantasy but some of their functions do differ. For example being at 0 HP doesn't mean you are out of the fight, you are just weakened and slow. If you use a potion you regain HP and can get back in the fight, but if you use an Elixir you gain your HP back and restore back you maximum HP amount. Phoenix Downs return to bring back completely wiped out fighters back in the fight, and if you are quick enough you can use them to spare you from getting a game over as well.

Experience is treated a bit differently in this Final Fantasy as well. When you are out and about the world map fighting baddies you earn experience that goes into a pool for your characters individually. This is earned by defeating monsters, completing quests, or using items if you do it properly. But it doesn't actually go to leveling up your characters until you "bank it" by resting. You can do this at various camp locations across the map, renting out trailers to stay in, or if you can swing the cash to do so stay in hotels. Why would you pay money for hotels if you can camp for free? Because the nicer location you stay in determines the bonus to the experience you get when you cash in, so you can boost your levels if you can afford to stay in nicer places.

"Camping is so comfortable thanks to this reliable and affordable COLEMAN camping equipment!"

One of the perks to camping however, is that one of party members (Ignus) will cook for the group. Cooking and eating meals can provide various party effects such as more stamina, better damage, bonus HP, or even experience boosting. You can also dine at restaurants without having to rest but obviously this costs money to do as well. Depending on the locations you've found or the quests you have done, This can be manipulated in a way that allows you to really cash in on the experience you earn to get the jump on the levels. 

Final Fantasy has finally taken that hard look at Skyrim and said "Huh, gamers really seem to like this open world thing. Maybe that's why they didn't like Final Fantasy 13's 20 hour linear corridor maps." It's about time. I don't know when Square thought less freedom was a good idea but they finally wised up and when full blown open world. Not complete freedom as some areas are locked off at the onset, and you can't drive anywhere that doesn't have a road, but it does allow for some multiple forms of travel and is pretty massive in scale.

So while you have your main story quests to complete, as you make pit stops around the map you will come across NPCs, shops, and eateries that will provide side quests for you to do. On top of the regular experience bonuses these provide they will also allow you to find new weapons and gear, hunt monsters to earn money (money is scarce in this game), unlock new recipes for bonus effects, and find more of the the Lucian weapons. I felt very reminded of Dragon Age: Inquisition or Skyrim that it was very easy to find myself moving from sidequest to sidequest and never actually getting to progressing with the story. I had to tell myself to move on at points.

Gear in this game is kept thankfully simple this time around. Noctis is the only character that can use everything, and the other 3 party members can only use specific gear so it shouldn't do much to complicate things. Get everyone the best available armor and weapons, and figure out what weapons you like to use for Noct. I personally stuck to the short sword, knives, one of the Lucian weapons, and a spell for my main slot set up.

Lucian weapons are tricky, by the way. While they are significantly more powerful than weapons you can buy along the way, but they come at a cost. Just by using them your health will immediately begin to deplete. But even if you don't use them in battle, they can have a significant affect on your base statistics. I was getting my ass kicked regularly at one point and I couldn't figure out why. Apparently, I later found out, that the Lucian axe I had equipped for my heavy weapon had reduced my defense to next to nothing for a massive attack boost, so you have to chose your gear carefully.

Magic is also a different beast. Its based around this Elemancy system they created. Essentially you have have 3 magic elementals of fire, ice, and lightning (a call back to FF1 perhaps?). You basically can collect elements along the world map, then harness them into a casting of a spell. The amount you use increases the potency which I assume correlates to how much damage they can do, and the right selection of abilities as you level allow you decrease the cost or increase the power as you make spells.

But there is a 4th option to elemancy as well where you can add a random item to the spell to give them bonus effects. Some of them use poison or stun, I used them make my spells quadra or quinta casts so using the spell once basically resulted in a massive nuclear strike for a huge area. This for some reason also hits your party as well but it doesn't appear to deal any damage to you. But the real kicker, and pretty much the only reason I used magic is you can use debased coins to make them cast with XP boost. So basically every time you cast a spell you get a free experience dump. Compounded with what you've learned about boosting experience from food and sleeping, you can really surge in levels if you do it properly.

Given everything I've said as you can clearly tell, this is not the cookie cutter JRPG that Bravely Default is for example. It's something I thought I wanted for Final Fantasy but if I am being completely honest, I actually really got into the changes to system. It felt seamless, there was still a degree of skill required to do it well, and the difficulty is skewed in a way that it really never feels easy. If something out levels you, you have to play things very carefully otherwise its going to be a constant scramble to keep using your items to keep you alive.

Much like how they started to in Final Fantasy X, there is a real sense of scale to all the baddies in this game as some monsters are teeny in size like the lovable cactaur, to brontosaurusly massive in scale to where you are only really hacking at a monsters ankles during a fight. And what I like about this is some of the lumbering monsters are generally passive in nature, so you can scoot right on by them without getting locked into a fight you don't want to be in.

As I have mentioned the game if fairly open world, so you will be doing a lot of back and forth exploring, the problem is it doesn't exactly allow you the freedom of travel like a Grand Theft Auto would provide. You are given this slick ride and given a massive map. You select a few sidequests to do and realize it would be much faster to cut across the field to get there. BZZZT. Nope, you have to stick to the roads. The car will literally not let you veer into the other lanes or off road unless there is a dirt trail to allow you to do so. So nine out of ten times you won't even bother driving yourself because there is no point. No freedom. Just let Ignis do it.

Or, just say fuck it and fast travel to the nearest point you can, and then ride a chocobo as close as you can. You rent them for dirt cheap for day spans so spend for the week and you can summon them at will. You will be covering a lot of ground so you should anyways because they get stronger and more effective as you do.

The music in this one is pretty good. I don't know if I would say that the music of Final Fantasy XV is notable, but that's because while you travel you can purchase CDs for your car of all the older Final Fantasy soundtracks, which I absolutely would rather be listening to. So most of the time I wasn't even hearing the XV soundtrack. The battle music is cool and does feel epic, and the music you hear during the weird pinball game at eateries are metal as fuck so that rocks. The game also opens up with a soft rendition of Stand by Me, which was a surprising change of pace to have an actual licensed song that wasn't from Nobuo Uematso.

I played this much longer than I probably should have.

So as I've mentioned you have your main story quests, you have your monster hunts (which seems to be the primary way to make money), and you have your side quests. The problem with this selection is that if you stick to the story quests, Final Fantasy XV is going to be an incredibly short game. I believe some Japanese gamers clocked it down to just under 14 hours. For a spectacle fighter or action adventure game that's pretty standard, but for a Final Fantasy it really isn't. So expect yourself to do some sidequests if you want to make the most of this game.

The problem with the sidequests is that the people who give them are just awful. Sure, it shows off some fairly impressive character design in the way that NPCs don't feel so generic when compared to the main cast. But a lot of them are just insufferable from a voice acting perspective. It's like they looked at the characters they were going to voice and just decided instead of finding a voice that seemed natural for the character, they would let a voice actor go nuts and try some new things they were fooling around with. They run this barrage of just awful character actor sounds: Dumb Hillbilly, Tough Lady, Italian Mobster, Annoying Bostonian. I tried to listen to quests, but some these characters were just awful.

While I'm on the subject of voice acting, let's talk about Eos as a whole shall we? I am very confused about the nature of this universe, Final Fantasy XV. You start me off meeting a widened old king and let me take control of an angsty hero, a British chef, and mullety toughguy, and wet diaper. Then literally right at the onset of the game, I feels like I'm driving in the midwest only everyone who lives there is a transplant from the deep south. With Cindy I don't mind it so much because I think she is adorable but the entire continent talking like the cast of Hee-Haw while wearing stylish future clothing is sending me a lot of mixed fucking messages.

The story in this game is a fucking mess, really. Honestly if you held a gun to my head and asked to me explain it I'd probably still be getting shot in the knee at best. I can mention some of the major aspects of it but honestly most of them main game is so unmemorable I vaguely remember what quests were actual story based missions and which were asides not based off the main narrative. Some of them I wonder why they are even in the game. It does the whole Evil Empire thing but then it will have you literally rubbing elbows with the games primary antagonist. There is a section where where you fight this hired gun out to stop you, and then literally the very next time you see her she joins your party. Consistency is not Final Fantasy XV's strong suit.

It's not a real likable main cast of characters either. Noctis is your prototypical spiky haired angsty machine. He's there to swing his sword and "pfft" or "tsch" his range of emotion during scenes. Ignis seems like he could be a cool character but honestly it seems like all the stuff that happens to him that develops him as a character happens without the player ever getting to see it. Prompto fucking sucks, he is a whiny ineffectual snot who I would leave locked in the trunk if I could. There is a particular story heavy mission where he casually drops this massive reveal about his character, that has about as jarring an effect as if you told me it was sunny out today. And Gladiolus could have been my favorite character but he's an inconsistent hypocrite, he straight up leaves the group to take care of some of his own shit and then when a major story event takes place he proceeds to be fucking shitty to a character for the remainder of the game for no fucking reason. This team sucks.

Which is a shame because there are some pretty great characters in this game. For a brief stint you get Gladiolus' sister Iris in your party and on top of fighting along side you, she's actually charming and fun. So of course she's gone before you get to enjoy it. The aforementioned hired gun, Areana Highwind, is a throwback to the Dragoon class who is a hardened mercenary and kind of bad ass, so naturally you get her for one mission and she's gone, which is a shame because as you talk to her you get a sense of where her loyalty actually is and its interesting. Hell I would have taken getting Cindy in the party just to hear her southern drawl as I traveled across the world map. In this game's defense though, I will admit I missed a lot of the individual character quests because I never made camp because there is no XP boost and camping is what makes most of them appear.

I would have swapped any of these characters to keep Iris on the team.

My hands down biggest problem with the game however, is the fucking product placement. There is one small one (a small American Express sign I didn't even notice) and 3 very egregious examples that I can cite: One, In the Kingsglaive film, in several rather prominent shots the film really drives home that they are driving around in a very stylish looking Audi (that they actually produced one of, that sold for like 350k). Two, In almost every scene where the team is at a campfire, the Coleman brand is prominently displayed on the camping equipment that is well centered in practically every single camping shot. And third, is sprinkled throughout billboards and shops are ads, and even the product of Cup Noodles.

Which would be fine by itself, but there is an actual fucking quest line about eating fucking Cup Noodles, and how you make Cup Noodles better to have the "ultimate flavor experience". Spoiler alert, it ends with the whole team realizing that after all the effort they put in Cup Noodles are just great as they are. FUCK. YOU. This was so ham-handledly crammed into the game I swear to god I almost stopped playing. Listening to Gladiolus sing the praises of the ambrosia of the gods that is fucking Cup Noodles was just product placement at sickening levels. Try to watch that mission and not get douchechills. Fuck you, Cup Noodles. Unless a particularly shitty game comes out this year, Cup Noodles is the 2017 worst of the year. Book It.

This is getting longwinded so I better wrap things up. Final Fantasy XV is not the last ditch hail mary masterpiece I think SquareEnix was hoping it would be, but it did end up being successful. They tried something different again and for the most part it does provide a pretty enjoyable experience. Is it the best Final Fantasy in the series? Not by a longshot. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth your time. If they had maybe dialed back on making everything epic in scale and fancy looking and spent a little more time formulating a more coherent storyline, and sold it all together instead of with movies and demos, Final Fantasy XV could have truly been something special.

Sadly, its not. But its still good. Definitely the one of the best showings of the game for any of the series after Final Fantasy X. They are still going to add a few more DLC chapters to the game to flesh out some of the things you can do and extend on the story a little bit but ultimately that comes as a too little too late for me. Final Fantasy XV is a pretty solid play and I would say I certainly got my monies worth out of it. Maybe a 6 or 7 out of 10.

I'd bump it to an 8 if it didn't have Promto.