Bioshock Infinite

Infinite is more of the same braindead pew-pew crap gameplay as the original Bioshock, but instead of objectivism and libertarianism it's got Ken Levine's strawmannified takes on American jingoism and race relations and time travel and parallel universes and dehumanization that never actually takes a firm position on anything; after all, every true artist (and their publisher) will tell you that diluting any hint of a message until it's unrecognizable is a small price to pay for just a few more sales.  And it's all brought to you at the cost of his company and hundreds of his coworkers' jobs and well-being because the gaming press has hyped him up as some infallible heaven-sent visionary for so long that he's started believing it himself.  (Ironic, then, that he sees absolutely no parallels to himself and his story's villain, a normal guy who becomes a self-proclaimed prophet so he can exploit people for personal gain.)  But I will admit, seeing a popup about how "not all confrontations need to be solved with violence" after an unavoidable shootout in broad daylight that left about 56 of my assailants dead was pretty goddamn funny; at least until I learned that it wasn't meant to be and it was an earnest attempt at incorporating "player choice" and "morality" into the proceedings, which - surprise - makes literally no difference to how the story plays out anyway.  I also guessed the big plot twist about 20 hours before it came (seriously, we've all seen Fight Club by now, quit ripping it off) so the whole thing is just an overstuffed, completely boring waste of time.  Too overblown, obnoxious and in love with itself to realize it's not saying anything novel or even intelligent, Bioshock Infinite is the gaming equivalent of Ricky Gervais.

 

 

Seriously Ken, you worked on Thief: The Dark Project and System Shock 2, two of the greatest games ever made; eat a slice of humble pie and start working on quality projects again, not self-indulgent prolefeed garbage...

Developer: Irrational Games
Publisher: 2K Games
Released: 2013
Platforms: XBox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, Mac OS X, Linux

Tecmo Secret of the Stars

A game I remember seeing in Nintendo Power but never really paid much attention to even as my interest in RPGs steadily grew over the years.  After asking around about the worst SNES RPG and having the name come up multiple times, though, I had to see if it really was as bad as so many people claimed.  While I'm still not quite convinced it's the worst, I can say with certainty that it is pretty dang bad.  First, despite having the look and sound design of a very early 16-bit effort, this game came out in mid-1995 in North America.  By then the RPG genre had evolved dramatically from its humble origins and several big names like Lunar, Final Fantasy VI, Phantasy Star IV, Earthbound and Shining Force were making waves on 16-bit platforms; hell, even Chrono Trigger was only a month away at the time of its launch, ensuring Secret of the Stars would be forgotten almost immediately.  In terms of design and writing the game feels like a Final Fantasy's outlandish fantasy elements and the irreverent bent of the Mother franchise, but done completely wrong on both parts.  First, the setting is stock fantasy fare with a few sci-fi elements blended in, like a less interesting Wizardry or Might and Magic, and the plot is about as generic as they come, with your central characters out to unlock their hidden potential and defeat an alien threat to their world; hell, the whole thing is outright spelled out for you in the opening moments of the game.  An interesting, but ultimately underutilized, element is that you're given two separate parties to control and can swap between them at any time - the Aqutallion, consisting of the five main characters destined to destroy the great evil, and the Kustera - a secondary group that cannot advance the plot or even directly aid the other party, instead just opening the occasional pathway for them or venturing through filler dungeons to acquire powerful treasures for the Aqutallion team to use.  Then you throw in a spotty translation that cripples any attempts at humor or character building, an atrocious encounter rate, a combat system with minimal strategy, the narrative constantly being interrupted for inane item searches and tons of mandatory, unskippable grinding, and you've got a pretty unpleasant experience on every front.  The 16-bit era was a great time for RPGs, but Tecmo Secret of the Stars ranks among the worst it had to offer; just play any of the other great classics of the era and let this turd remain buried.

Developer: Tecmo

Publisher: Tecmo

Released: 1995

Platforms: SNES

Dragon Age: Origins

Mass Effect was just lame - an utterly boring slog that cribs elements of other, better science fiction works while adding no unique twists of its own.  But I had at least a little hope for Dragon Age.  While BioWare was never very good at making a "role-playing experience", surely they could at least recapture the challenging tactical gameplay, interesting characters and captivating narratives of the old Infinity Engine games, right?  Well, it was an RPG on a console in 2009 - a time period when people valued pretty cutscenes and online functionality gimmicks over gameplay or requiring any thought to complete - so you can guess how well it went.  Rather than having 60+ classes, numerous pieces of equipment, a vast array of potions, scrolls and spells and countless character builds to experiment with, you get... 3.  Yep, it's the old Fighter/Thief/Mage trifecta with boring, linear skill trees to determine what slightly different tactics you can employ, in theory at least. In practice combat mostly consists of big, slow, boring rounds of Rockem Sockem Robots, with everyone trading blows until one side falls and getting healed to full immediately after if you win.  No stakes, no tension, hardly any tactics and no fun.  Christ, even Diablo II, released nearly a decade prior, had far deeper combat and character building than this, and even Diablo 1 had more character choices if you factor in the Hellfire expansion pack. The plot is utterly predictable dark fantasy fare, pitting the humanoid races against whatever generic big threat is the current flavor of the month (darkspawn zombies, in this case).  The writing continues to suck major ass in the same way Mass Effect's did, just aping from other, better stories and cramming in everything you need to know via huge stretches of flat exposition that read more like a car manual than conversations between characters.  Don't expect any decent worldbuilding either because, of course, it's all relegated to utterly boring wiki articles you get to exit out of the gameplay completely to read; we wouldn't want to disrupt the constant action and risk losing that lucrative audience of thirteen-year-old boys who only care about mindless monster bashing and titties and cheevos!  Dragon Age also just screams "desperate moneymaking scam" because as you play there's constant popups about its dozens of DLC releases - nearly all of them being short, unsatisfying hour-long quests they're trying to milk $5 or more apiece out of.  Yeah... all the fanboys still whingeing on about Oblivion's horse armor can officially piss right off, because at least Bethesda had the courtesy to not pester me about buying it every three minutes.

Dragon Age: Origins is shallow, unoriginal and ruthlessly boring, but that's the entire point of it existing.  There was never a thought spared by Electronic Arts for making a decent game, just for milking a few dollars out of nostalgia for the D&D-clone RPGs that came before it while investing as little development time and money as possible.  Alongside other overhyped and over-derivative '00s/early '10s turds like Bioshock, Dishonored, Dead Space, Witcher, Mass Effect, Dark Souls and especially Halo, it's just another example of companies cashing in on platform bias - shamelessly copycatting things PC and retro console games had already done brilliantly years prior, stripping out any trace of intelligence, depth or complexity they had to make them 'broadly accessible', and selling it as the next big cultural revolution to early teenagers too young to know they're being served a cheap knockoff and fanboys too in love with their corporate gods to care.  It only becomes worse once you consider BioWare once worked on a few of those great games they're now making empty, soulless clones of; they've clearly got talent at their disposal and EA chooses not to use it because they can just buy positive reviews regardless.  An utterly disgraceful exploitation of a once prestigious name, Dragon Age marked the end of any hope I had of BioWare ever being good again.

Developer: BioWare
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Released: 2009
Platforms: XBox 360, PC, PlayStation 3

Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero

Mortal Kombat of course needs no introduction; a popular '90s fighting game franchise that combined martial arts, monsters and magic, it quickly became a fan favorite for its unique comic book flair and for having tons of hidden secrets for players to unlock.  It also drew plenty of controversy for its over-the-top violent finishing moves and mid-match bloodletting, and was almost singlehandedly responsible for the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board and their content rating system that appears on every video game released to this day.  Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero was presumably intended to be the first of a sub-franchise that would have expanded the series' lore and storytelling, though its poor critical reception (as well as the dismal failure of another spinoff game, Mortal Kombat Special Forces) quickly put a damper on those plans.  It isn't difficult to see why the game flopped after only a few minutes of playing it, either; essentially, they attempted to take a fighting game engine and incorporate platforming, puzzle solving and RPG-style levels and boss fights into it, and the end result was - to put it charitably - disastrous.  Enemies all have the same strange AI as the 2D Mortal Kombat games, which is to say they're either braindead easy or read every input from your controller and instantly counter it until you're dead.  Every level is laden with platforming puzzles and traps that either eat a huge chunk of your health or (much more frequently) just kill you instantly, and avoiding them is a pain owing to the fact that the screen doesn't scroll until you're roughly 2/3 of the way from the edge.  Each level is also a convoluted maze where enemies can attack at virtually any time, and you have to hit a button to turn Sub-Zero around to face them every time they come from behind or jump over you (and lord help you if enemies attack from both sides at once).  The RPG element also feels lazily implemented - you get points for defeating enemies and unleashing combos, and reaching certain thresholds unlocks more special moves, including Sub-Zero's freeze blast; that's right, you don't even start the game with the character's signature move.  Boss fights are downright nightmarish too, often requiring extremely niche tactics to even hit them, let alone whittle down their enormous life bars, and they can generally kill you in only a few hits (which you often cannot block).  You do get items that restore health, boost your attack/defense or grant temporary invincibility, but these are so few and far between and the combat is so frequent that they barely provide any help, and if you die and have to restart a boss battle after using some, they don't come back.  Just an amazingly frustrating and poorly-planned experience on every front.  Hell, when there's secret codes to give yourself 999 lives and unlimited health powerups and even that barely makes it more tolerable, you know your game is in serious trouble.  The only highlight of the whole mess are the live action cutscenes, which showcase some truly cheesy acting and special effects, and it's almost worth suffering through the aggravation just to watch them.  Almost.

Developer: Midway Games, Avalanche Software
Publisher: Midway Games
Platform: Playstation, Nintendo 64
Released: 1997, 1998

Lord of the Rings, Volume 1 (1994)

Interplay's 1990 adaptation of Lord of the Rings for various computer platforms was a pretty decent one for its time, taking the skill-based roleplaying element of games like Wasteland, having an engine and game world somewhat similar to Ultima VI, and being a relatively faithful adaptation of the books besides.  The 1994 SNES game of the same name is a much different beast. largely exhuming the RPG elements of the original in favor of a more action-driven experience.  In fact, it seems to draw some inspiration from 1993's Secret of Mana, allowing up to five players to join in the action via the SNES's Multitap peripheral and battle their way across Middle Earth.  But while I'm admittedly no big fan of Secret of Mana,  I can say that is a much superior experience to this one - the rather drab world design of the computer game carries over here, meaning you'll be wandering through an awful lot of dull, indistinct corridors (and enormous dungeons comprised of the same) on the way to your goals.  The story is also padded out to the point of inanity with dull fetch quests, and even the gameplay itself is bland - there's no new equipment to earn and only a few utilitarian items to find, and no means by which to revive fallen allies - once a character is dead, they're gone for good.  The whole thing is pretty tedious and not very fun - even moreso if you're playing alone, where you have to put up with lousy party AI that runs headlong into danger and dies almost immediately (also a common problem in Secret of Mana, I found; but at least in that game you could resurrect your dead comrades).  Even some detailed graphics and wonderfully-realized music and ambient sounds for the hardware can't salvage it, making it a game that was pretty quickly forgotten in its time and is downright dire compared to modern action-RPG outings.  Which may also explain why Volume 2 never got a console adaptation.

Developer: Interplay Productions
Publisher: Interplay Productions

Released: 1994

Platform: SNES

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes of the Lance

Released on computers as part of SSI's "Silver Box" line, Heroes of the Lance is a loose adaptation of the DragonLance series of novels inspired by the eponymous D&D modules, and a relatively unique take on the D&D format, focusing on real time action rather than turn-based strategic combat.  Decent enough for a 1988 computer game, especially in a period where computers were still generally considered "business machines" and thus side-scrolling action gameplay like this was pretty novel (if not particularly well-suited to the hardware), but its 1991 NES port is another heavily derided game on the platform.  The ugly graphics, irritating music and stiff controls didn't endear it too much to fans of side-scrolling action games like Super Mario Bros, while RPG fans were let down by the absence of narrative and the general lack of depth to the game's combat and dungeon crawling.   Despite being an action game everything is still centered around dice rolls, so it's not a matter of skill-based attacking and evading; instead, you mostly just stand toe-to-toe with your enemies and hold down the A button to swing at each other until one of you dies.  Disarming traps is solely a matter of having the right character in the front of your party (or taking the hit - they rarely do much damage anyway), and most offensive spells you have are pretty useless.  Oh, and it's also possible to make the game unwinnable - if Goldmoon (or another character carrying her staff) drops into a pit, you're done; that staff is the only thing that can kill the final boss.  But most insulting of all is its length - while it takes place in a fairly large and convoluted maze, once you know the route to go through and how to counter the few enemy curveballs it throws at you, you can beat the whole game in under ten minutes.  Even for masochistic fans of bad games, it's too short, easy and lacking in nuance to provide any ironic entertainment value.  Hell, it hardly even seems worth the effort to pan it on my nerdy site about RPGs; everyone who knows the NES port is already aware it's a sucky game that's widely regarded as one of the worst on the platform, and I don't have much to add other than to confirm it really is bad, but not even in a way that makes it interesting.  Unappealing, lame and entirely forgettable, Heroes of the Lance is just a lousy experience no matter what angle you come at it from.

Developer: US Gold, Natsume (NES)

Publisher: Strategic Simulations, US Gold, Pony Canyon
Released: 1988, 1991
Platform: Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, FM Towns, MS-DOS, MSX2, NEC PC-8801, PC-9801, NES, Sega Master System, ZX Spectrum

Deadly Towers

One of the first NES RPGs to ever be localized, it's also one that's a common target for caustic reviewers, beginning with internet comedian Seanbaby famously deriding it as the worst NES game ever made.  That's a bit hyperbolic, of course - there are far worse NES games out there.  But that doesn't mean Deadly Towers is some kind of hidden gem; it earns pretty much all of the criticism it's gotten.  Each of the game's towers is an enormous, convoluted maze with a room count well into the triple digits, with nearly every screen looking extremely similar and being packed to the brim with monsters.  To make matters worse, you're a rather large target, and virtually every screen has you taking a cheap hit from an enemy as soon as you enter and/or features ledges you can easily fall or get knocked off of, resulting in instant death.  Even the game seems to be aware aware of this; each death dispenses a password and then, upon pressing Start, you're immediately dropped back at the start of the game, retaining all the powerups and gear you'd collected save for your money (which is reset back to 50).  It's also easy to stumble into invisible warps that take you to new areas (and even some 'beneficial' items do this), making navigation even more of a pain.  Combat isn't much fun either - you can throw a single sword at the start and are completely defenseless until it lands or goes offscreen; once either happens, you can throw another, so defeating nearly all enemies is just a matter of getting up next to them and spamming your sword until they die.  Upgraded swords behave the same, just traveling faster and doing slightly more damage, so there's virtually no variety to the combat.  The graphics are serviceable for a 1986 Famicom game, if rather uninspired, and the music is decently composed, though the fact that the tracks are so short and reset to the start every single time you enter a new room means you'll get tired of them quickly.  As bad as the game is I'll at least cut it a little bit of slack, though - Japanese RPGs and action-based ones in particular were still in relative infancy at the time, most early examples of the genre tended to be pretty rough, and the vast majority of them pre-1987 or so are only worth a quick look nowadays as historical curios.  Only a little bit, though; after all, Deadly Towers came out several months after Dragon Quest and The Legend of Zelda did in Japan and a month after Zelda's debut in the US.  As for which of these games are still worth playing through today and which are only of interest to gaming historians or sheer masochists, well, that's a no-brainer.

Developer: Lenar, Tamtex
Publisher: Irem, Broderbund
Platform: NES
Released: 1987

YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG

 YIIK is a game that clearly wanted to be seen as something profound, but mostly just feels like a series of comically misguided mistakes.  Combat utilizes timed button presses and minigames akin to games like Paper Mario and Undertale, but ends up being so drawn-out and arduous (normal enemy fights can easily exceed twenty minutes in length, to say nothing of bosses) that you'll get tired of it very quickly.  Its protagonist, allegedly a "flawed person you'll come to like on his journey" does no such thing, mostly coming off as a manipulative sociopath who never even thinks twice about all the damage he does, let alone attempts to make amends or become a better person in the end.  The story is Persona 4 crossed with the worst kind of I-read-the-CliffsNotes-version-of-Schrödinger-and-Nietzsche-and-now-I'm-above-it-all shlock, with droning walls of badly acted, redundantly worded purple prose that try so desperately to sound smart and poignant and are mostly just grating and self-indulgent.   But what really sours the milk for me is the creator's attitude.  His reaction to criticism of the game was to simply attack its detractors, claiming that "video games are for babies" and that they just aren't smart/mature enough to understand his big important masterwork.  No guy, we get it; unlike you, though, we recognize it as yet another piece that calls itself  'revolutionary' and 'poignant' when it's shamelessly derivative, self-aggrandizing and lacks any genuine appreciation of the other works it's clearly cribbing from.  You've fallen into the same trap as other dollar store visionaries like Zeboyd and Ken Levine and Polytron, completely disregarding the ingenuity and passion behind games you allegedly admire and instead saying "Wow, this sure is popular; if I make a knockoff of it to serve as a vehicle for my own  hobby horses and disingenuous moralizing, then I'LL be regarded as a genius too!".  Too bad you also forgot that for every knockoff game that breaks even, there's at least a dozen that are quickly discarded and forgotten.  Persona itself even has some perfect examples; you sure as hell don't hear anyone talking about Mind Zero or Tokyo Xanadu or Conception these days, do you?  (And to further cement my point: all of those games are less than ten years old.)

Oh, and as the TV Tropes page for YIIK points out, this isn't the only time the author has embarrassed himself like this.  He even had the gall to make a protagonist of his previous title (Two Brothers) soapbox for him in this one, dismissing poor reviews leveled toward that game and not even bothering to acknowledge the fact that the brunt of player complaints stemmed from it clearly being unfinished and containing numerous game-killing bugs that he simply never bothered to fix.  It's one thing to make lousy products, but it's another altogether to write off even the most earnest of criticism and be a giant baby about the fact it exists.  I hope that in time the author will learn a lesson in humility and how to take critique in stride, and that one day he'll be able to parlay that into creating something good from a place of genuine passion, but it's abundantly clear that won't be happening anytime soon. 

Developer: Ackk Studios
Publisher: Ysbryd Games 
Released: 2019
Platforms: PC, MacOS, Playstation 4, Switch

Underworld Ascendant

Underworld Ascendant got people buzzing at the time of its announcement, and it isn't hard to see why.  An officially licensed sequel to a cult classic DOS franchise (the Ultima Underworld spinoff series) from a company founded by Looking Glass and Irrational Games alumni and later joined by legendary developer Warren Spector; how could it go wrong?  Well, the answer turned out to be "releasing a very buggy, unfinished disaster with clumsy collision and physics, graphical bugs aplenty (with models often stretching into indecipherable masses of polygons) and a save system that puts the player back at the start of a level, regardless of their progress".  This, plus just generally feeling amateurish and poorly-optimized, with memory leakage, uneven framerates and frequent crashes emblematic of amateur-led Unity games, makes Underworld Ascendant a cautionary tale about the risks of crowdfunding and coasting on residual prestige.  There has since been a patch released to attempt to fix some of these problems, but as far as I'm concerned, it's too little, too late; if you want a good cerebral dungeon crawl you have plenty of better options than to wait for this one to maybe possibly reach the realm of "passable" one day.  Like the classic Ultima Underworld games whose legacy Ascendant irrevocably tarnishes. 

Developer: Otherside Entertainment
Publisher: 505 Games
Released: 2018
Platforms: PC, macOS, Linux, Playstation 4

Ultima: Escape From Mt. Drash

An extremely rare title released exclusively on the VIC-20 computer system in its twilight days.  Despite the name, though, it doesn't resemble Ultima whatsoever in terms of design, instead being more of a simple dungeon crawler - each floor gives you 99 seconds to navigate a simple 8x8 maze and reach the end.  Combat is a strange affair, putting the player in a side-view and having them position their character and try to hit a specific point on the enemy's body with a timed button press before they approach too closely and take one of their few "lives".  The problem, though, is that the game isn't particularly fun; the mazes get very samey after a while, and though the combat seems simple, landing hits is irritatingly precise, making getting through the game a source of extremely tedious trial-and-error and luck rather than a test of skill.  Because of this, as well as being released well after the Commodore 64 launched, the game has since become extremely scarce, with only around thirteen copies known to still exist and selling for thousands of dollars during their rare appearances on eBay. A complete copy of the tape has never been made available online to deter counterfeiting, making it difficult to even emulate.  It may be worth trying out the fan remake for PC platforms briefly as an odd curiosity, but if you've got the money to burn, I can safely say that this one simply is not worth the asking price.

Developer: Keith Zabalaoui
Publisher: Sierra On-Line
Released: 1983
Platforms: Commodore VIC-20

Lunar: Dragon Song

 This one held some promise for fans of Game Arts and especially the cult classic Lunar series, especially at a time when the newly-released Nintendo DS was still looking for a good RPG to its name.  Japan Art Media had previously contributed to the Lunar remakes on the Playstation, as well as the surprisingly decent (if not amazing) GBA remake of the first game, so surely they'd have what it takes to make a worthwhile sequel to the series, right?  Well, sadly, that ended up not being the case.  This is in no small part due to the game trying to reinvent the wheel when it came to mechanics.  Running to avoid monsters lowers the party's HP, which rather defeats the purpose of doing so in the first place.  One can choose to earn items or experience from battles (though, for no adequately explained reason, you only get one or the other at a time - never both).  Equipment breaks with repeated use and money is rather scarce, so even keeping your party equipped is a major issue.  But perhaps most frustratingly, the movement-based strategic combat of Lunar is replaced with a simple turn-based system, and one cannot even target enemies of their own volition - they simply pick an attack and the game selects for them, which takes a huge strategic element out of combat and simply turns it into a long sequence of spamming attacks.  The party has also been downsized to three characters - half that of the two mainline entries - which is just a bit baffling.  Even the plot holds little of interest, with some downright dopey writing, tons of tedious backtracking, bland characters that don't have anything particularly memorable about them (especially compared to the first two Lunars), and a plot which is just a poor retelling of the first game's with no fresh twist put upon it.  Among RPG fans, Lunar: Dragon Song is synonymous with squandered potential, and given that its predecessors are regarded as genre classics, it's all the more disappointing for it.

  

Not since the writings of the great Stephenie Meyer have we seen such well-realized characters!

Developer: Japan Art Media
Publisher: Marvelous Interactive, Ubisoft, Rising Star Games
Released: 2005
Platforms: Nintendo DS

Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes

Yep, it's another attempt at a multiplayer Zelda, this time for the 3DS.  That effectively mitigates the boneheaded design flaw of the original (being a console game yet requiring handheld systems and link cables to play), but it has some screwups of its own; like only being able to play single player or three players, but having no option for two.  Aside from that, it's basically the same experience as Four Swords, being stage-based, linear and full of simplistic combat and puzzles - mostly based around stacking atop one another and tossing each other over gaps or up onto ledges.  There is an attempt in adding some replay value with a plethora of unlockable costumes for your Links, but it adds little to the longevity of the game unless you're a die-hard completionist.  It might be a bit of fun with two friends, but overall it's a short, lackluster and generally forgettable game that ranks among the series' worst.  There were plenty of better co-op games out there before the 2010's rolled around, so this one just felt dire by 2015.

Developer: Nintendo/Grezzo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: 2015
Platforms: Nintendo 3DS

The Last Story

Final Fantasy was on a rocky road for a good while after the turn of the millennium; Squaresoft merged with Enix following significant financial difficulties and many of their biggest names split from the company over the next few years; most prominently Hironobu Sakaguchi, Final Fantasy's creator.  It certainly didn't help that the company's first forays into HD gaming - The Last Remnant and Final Fantasy XIII - were underwhelming messes that left a sizable portion of their fanbase feeling disappointed and betrayed.  That left a perfect opening for Sakaguchi's new company to reclaim his crown with a big budget high-quality RPG release, so he did just that, right?  Well... no.  If Lost Odyssey was a poor man's Final Fantasy X (which was already a craptastic game, by the way), this one is the poor man's Final Fantasy XIII, trying way too hard to be 'cinematic' and forgetting all about important elements like gameplay and competent writing.  With clunky, poorly explained and confusing mechanics, 100% railroaded progression, awful party AI, a messy narrative with countless plot holes,  a thoroughly obnoxious and unlikable central cast compounded with terrible acting every step of the way, and tons of lag and framerate issues due to being shoehorned onto aging Wii hardware, it's just a wretched experience all around.  But, being codeveloped by the team that brought us amazing classics like Ju-On: the Grudge, Vampire Rain and Bullet Witch, is that really a surprise?  If you're wondering why Mistwalker has mostly moved into making low-stakes mobile games and Sakaguchi is only spoken of fondly in the past tense nowadays, well, look no further.

Developer: Mistwalker, AQ Interactive
Publisher: XSeed Games
Released: 2012
Platforms: Wii

Final Fantasy XIII-2

Final Fantasy XIII-2 was released two years after the much-hated original game, and sadly, it's still a pretty abysmal experience.  Though at the very least I can say that it addresses a few fan complaints and overall does a better job of what the original set out to accomplish (whether that was worth doing in the first place, however, is a topic I've already made my stance quite clear on). The game's action is considerably improved, with cleaner shots and dynamic setpieces during battles that lend it more of an action movie-like feel.  Cutscenes are also spiced-up slightly by incorporating QTE events, allowing you to score damage on your opponents before the fight properly begins or deal extra damage during big attacks by mashing buttons or tilting control sticks instead of just sitting idle. There was also an attempt made to have the game feel less like a strictly linear and braindead experience, giving the player many more wide-open areas to explore, hidden objects to find, enemies randomly spawning on the map (though one can still avoid combat if they move far enough away before the onscreen gauge falls into the red) and the ability to actually traverse obstacles with a jump button instead of an automated event; small touches in the grand scheme, but they do make gameplay at least a little more engaging.  However, the rest of XIII-2's design still leaves much to be desired. The constant banter from onscreen NPCs clutters up the screen and becomes an earsore to listen to after a while, and the "multiple choice" dialog prompts are just baffling in their existence.  Basically you get to pick one of four options at set points in the story, getting different dialog from each one, but that's it; you can't also pick the other answers for more information a la a CRPG.  Sorry, but I'm not playing through your game four different times just to see all the possible dialog, especially when it's no less banal than the first game's and none of your choices have any actual impact on the narrative anyhow.  XIII-2 is a better game than the first, but not by nearly enough; with only small tweaks made to a fundamentally fatally flawed experience, it is the perfect example of polishing a turd.

Developer: Square Enix
Publisher: Square Enix
Released: 2012
Platforms: XBox 360, Playstation 3, PC, iOS, Android

Final Fantasy XIII

Final Fantasy XIII is a heavily maligned game among the series' fanbase, who criticize it for its restrictively linear layout, poorly-structured story, grating writing, scene staging (or lack thereof) on level with a bad Michael Bay movie, and greatly simplified gameplay.  But in an age where hyperbole and groupthink reign, is it really all that bad?  After having played it myself, my answer has to be yes.  Not only is it exactly as unpleasant a game experience as it's cracked up to be, it might just take the cake for the most dumbed-down entry to a beloved RPG franchise of all time; even moreso than Dragon Age 2, Digital Devil Saga or the oft-maligned-but-honestly-not-that-bad Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.  I never once believed I'd pine for Final Fantasy X's constricted design over anything, but XIII takes its suffocating linearity to a new extreme, simply having the player walk down a narrow corridor, encountering enemies every few steps, for nearly 75% of the adventure; it's only some thirty hours in before the world finally opens up and allows for some free exploration.  Combat in the game is downright braindead as one now only controls a single character (the other two being AI-controlled), picks a pre-made "paradigm" (which they laughably try to sell as a substitute for job classes) and then chooses "Auto Battle" to carry out a series of pre-selected attacks or spells, only having to use a potion here and there to stop their party from dying.  It actually resembles Panzer Dragoon Saga's combat in some respects, trying to be both cinematic and strategic, but unlike PDS it's so dumbed down and repetitious that it succeeds at being neither. The game's main selling point was in its animated cutscenes, but even those aren't satisfying to watch, mostly relying on non-interactive action full of ugly, close-in shakycam fights that are repetitious at best and almost incomprehensible at worst.  Even boss battles are bland, with slow camera pans, clumsy physics (models gently pushing one another out of the way happening too many times to count) and attack animations that just get tiresome after you've seen them a thousand times, no matter how many shiny particle and aurora effects they sprinkle on them.  But moreover, you just don't care who's winning or losing because the narrative gives you no reason to get invested in its characters or events; every scene casually drops loads of dull-as-dirt exposition packed with unexplained terminology (relegated to the much-hated Plot Codex, which you have to stop and read frequently throughout the adventure to catch up on), and the incredibly shallow protagonists and trite slapstick humor and angst throughout only proves that flowery writing is no substitute for giving your characters personalities.  The character designs and overblown constant bling effects don't look 'cool' either, despite what fanboys will tell you - they look as good as computers and a complete bankruptcy of animation can make something look.  Final Fantasy XIII tries to be more movie than game, but without a well-planned story, a memorable cast, writing that ever captivates, action that's any fun to watch or any art direction beyond "looking pretty", it fundamentally fails on every level.  It's blatantly obvious that this is software's algorithmically generated idea of what a "cool" game looks like - completely superficial, with no genuine passion or substance to be found beneath that shiny coat of paint.  It doesn't appeal to me as a long time RPG fan, and frankly I can't fathom it appealing to people who like Final Fantasy, or RPGs, or stories, or characters, or even video games - it's just for those who like to push buttons and see sparkly effects flash across the screen, no matter how vapid and empty the rest of the experience is.  This might just be the first role-playing game made, quite literally, for toddlers.

Developer: Square Enix

Publisher: Square Enix

Released: 2010
Platforms: XBox 360, Playstation 3, PC, iOS, Android

Fallout 76

Fallout 76 is a game that has been quagmired in negativity from the word "Go", lacking the immersion of previous Fallouts by replacing all human NPCs with robots who dispense quests in the most sterile fashion imaginable, generally buggy design prone to frequent crashing, and preorder bonuses being fulfilled with much cheaper merchandise than was promised.  That, plus rampant and nearly-unchecked player cheating, security breaches in Bethesda's support system, an immensely overpriced in-game microtransaction system and a much-derided premium service that costs another $100 a year atop the already enormous price gouging present, have only worsened its image further, leading to it being known as one of the most cursed games of the modern era.   

But beyond the storm of corporate meddling, is there a worthwhile game to be found?  Well, I suppose that all hinges on how much you enjoyed Fallout 4.  76 is essentially that with a mediocre multiplayer element tacked on, letting you explore a vast world, complete story quests at your leisure and build your own settlements, to either ally with other players against the odds or get into turf wars with them (if you can find a group that's willing to play fair and not just resort to readily-available cheating tools).  Subsequent patches have also reintroduced some humanoid NPCs, improving the game's immersion factor, and the underlying storyline is decent if unremarkable, giving you something to stay motivated in the course of all your extra-curricular settlement building and player interaction.  However, it retains many of the same problems Fallout 4 had, too.  Nothing you do ever feels like it makes much of a significant change in the world, and it really doesn't, as it's only ever acknowledged by other players - usually at the barrel of a gun while they try to tear down your buildings in search of profit.  The crafting system itself is arbitrary and makes little sense, particularly as half the things you build provide no tangible benefit and the system itself lacks some very common-sense things you'd expect to be included.  There's a certain overhanging frustration in the fact that you can build laser turrets, water purifiers and nuclear reactors out of trash you find laying around a ruined office building, but still can't build a functional vehicle because the game's still running on a code base that's over two decades old at this point (and with their shareholders pulling the chain and demanding profits RIGHT NOW, it's unlikely they'll have the time or resources to adopt a new engine anytime soon).

76's premise is a good one - an open-world free-for-all where you can shape the wasteland to your will - but like Fallout 4 before it, the execution falls several steps short.  Fallout is a free-roaming RPG franchise beloved by fans for its immersive storytelling and design, and online open-world sandbox shooters are known for their fast-paced, yet strategic gameplay; when 76 takes a mediocre storyline and pastes a half-baked version of Fortnite on top of it, it just becomes a lesser version of two well-established genre staples that doesn't end up pleasing fans of either.  That, plus all of the aforementioned unsavory elements of its launch and the subsequent money-making scammery associated with it, make it a game I simply can't recommend to anyone.

Developer: Bethesda Game Studios 

Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

Released: 2018

Platforms: Playstation 4, XBox One, PC

Final Fantasy X

Final Fantasy makes the leap to the sixth generation, with Square giving their all to make the tenth game just as groundbreaking on the Playstation 2 as VII was on the original Playstation.  But does Final Fantasy X push the series to new heights, or just send it tumbling down the staircase to irrelevance?

Square's popularity exploded on the Playstation, with VII being regarded as one of the greatest games of all time and raising interest in the series to new heights.  Two followups came, though they met with a more mixed reception (balance issues and overly drawn-out gameplay and animations at the forefront), the series attempted to branch out into the realm of film (with less than stellar results) and just about every prior game in the series got a port to the Playstation as well.  When the shiny new Playstation 2 rolled around, however, Square was not ready for the occasion, attempting to hold their fans over with a mediocre beat-em-up called the Bouncer while their next big game was in the works.

Final Fantasy X was released in late 2001, and would probably become one of the most divisive games in the series after its release.  While the game undeniably looked gorgeous and had a stellar soundtrack - that had all but become Square's moneymaker at this point - its gameplay was simplified in many respects and made unnecessarily complex in others, while its narrative was hampered by irritating voice acting and just feeling like it was just going through the motions of a generic JRPG plot yet again.  And as those who know me know, I did not care at all for the new direction it took the franchise in.

From Final Fantasy VIII on, the franchise's main selling point was seemingly only its aesthetics, with immaculately-detailed backdrops and characters and animations drawn out to the point where they've basically become a running joke among genre fans.  Final Fantasy X continues in that trend while seemingly going out of its way to add as much detail to every aspect of the game as possible, even when it makes no sense.  To that end, virtually every object and character is rendered with frills and asymmetrical details that are seemingly designed to lend it a whimsical fantasy feel rather than feel practical in the slightest.  It lends the game a showy feel at first, but before long I just found it unnecessary and distracting.

Another change for the worse comes in the game's overall design.  Simply put, Final Fantasy X is far more linear and railroaded than any prior game in the series, almost to a comical degree.  The whole game is basically just one linear path, with only a few chances to stray off and do sidequests.  Even when the airship is unlocked late in the game, there is no "world map" to travel across, instead just giving you a list of previous checkpoints you've encountered and letting you warp straight there.  This, again, seemingly ties into the game's presentation, with Square wanting to show off graphics as much as possible even to the detriment of gameplay and the feeling of exploration that has been central to the RPG genre since its inception.

Combat is also changed up in many ways, for both better and worse.  Encounters are still random, which by 2002 was beginning to feel very dated.  The famous Active Time Battle system is traded in for a more traditional turn-based one, though it still operates on something of a time scale - characters get turns at set intervals based on their speed stat, and certain actions taken can make turns come faster or slow down others.  For example, Tidus has an ablity called Quick Hit that does less damage than his standard attack, but causes his next turn to come more quickly, while Delay Buster will cause the target's next turn to come later if it hits.  This adds a bit of strategy to fights by letting the player sneak in turns more quickly or delay an enemy's strike if they're about to use a big attack, affording an opportunity to put up a barrier or heal the party before impact.  Characters can also be freely swapped in and out mid-fight, which can occasionally help get a weakened character out of harm's way; however, the game still ends immediately if all three active characters are incapacitated.

Other hallmarks of the series are changed up as well, for both better and worse.  Summons now work much differently, essentially replacing the party temporarily with a new single character until they die or are dismissed; I generally didn't find these too useful, however, as having a single target for multiple enemies to hit just means they die that much more easily.  Overdrives (limit breaks, essentially) work as they did in Final Fantasy VIII, with some taking the form of simple damage-dealing minigames while others work as more traditional Final Fantasy mechanics - Kimahri can cast Blue Magic while Rikku can mix potions together for a variety of powerful supportive or damaging effects.  The best effects generally require spending rare and expensive items, so they are best saved for difficult battles.

Another clever change comes in the fact that, in some scripted battles, puzzle elements are occasionally worked in.  One early boss is knocked back after taking a big enough hit, and enough hits done in this fashion will allow the player to knock it off a cliff and kill it instantly.  Others come into play over the course of the game as well - using Lightning to activate a crane to damage enemies, teleporting between various pads on the field to evade a bosses' big attack, and so forth.  Sadly, these only appear in scripted events - random encounters are just the typical line-up-and-fight Final Fantasy fare.

The mechanics outside of battle are more of a mixed bag.  One notable changeup is the Overdrive Modes; simply put, these cause your Overdrives to build in ways other than simply taking damage.  Warrior will cause the Overdrive gauge to fill when you take damage, for example, while Victim causes it to build when a character is inflicted with a status effect.  For the most part I didn't find these worth bothering with; they either take too long to build up to be useful or just require the player to be at a significant disadvantage, and since limits are not nearly as grotesquely overpowered as in earlier games, I generally just stuck to the standard setting of Stoic.

(It should be noted that another ability causes bonus experience points to be gained instead of filling the Overdrive gauge, and when used in combination with the Loner setting and a turbo controller, the player could get absurd amounts of XP in relatively short order by simply killing off the other two characters and repeatedly passing turns.  That said, this was only present in the original Japanese release and removed from all other versions.)

The customizability certainly doesn't stop there.  Instead of weapons with fixed effects, Final Fantasy X has something of a crafting system, with each weapon the player finds having a set number of slots.  These can be equipped with various abilities - stat boosters, inflicting status effects, and so forth - and doing so will change the weapon's appearance and name to match.  This ends up being downright broken in some cases, as one can acquire an item that give the Stone effect early on and equip it on their weapons, giving them a 30% chance of an instant kill against any random enemies they encounter and chopping a huge portion of the game's challenge.

Final Fantasy X also (in)famously attempts to retain the open-ended character growth of its predecessors, though its handling is less than stellar.  Rather than traditional levels and skills, Final Fantasy X utilizes the Sphere Grid - a sprawling "board game" of sorts where the six playable characters, represented by "tokens", move across the grid and can spend points to unlock stat boosts and abilities on any squares they land on.  A novel idea, but a lackluster execution, as it's largely pointless; for much of the game, characters are all but locked to specific regions of the grid and forced into a particular archetype (with Kimahri infamously being closed into a small portion with only eight or so spaces until about a third of the way through the game, rendering him all but useless).  But even once the locks begin to open and grant characters access to different choices, it only presents a non-dilemma; do you want to be really good at, say, Fighting, or be mediocre at both fighting and casting White magic?  And if you change your mind later, it's not as simple as going back to the previous fork and going back down the other path instead; you actually have to earn more levels and spend more points to backtrack and go down another path.  In essence, it chokes off one of Final Fantasy's defining features and just adds a lot more grinding to the game.

Worse than this, though, are the numerous minigames and sidequests seemingly crafted as exercises in pure frustration and tedium.  Blitzball is a hybrid of an RPG and a sports game (and a near point-for-point ripoff of Tecmo Cup Soccer for the NES) that proves to just be infuriatingly slow-paced and tedious with its drawn-out animations and terrible starting team stats that the player has to slowly grind up to acceptable levels.  Lightning dodging on the Thunder Plains requires split-second timing lest you get knocked down and forced into more random encounters, while the chocobo racing minigame is a frustrating affair of fighting against non-responsive controls in an effort to get bonuses and ultimately achieve a time of less than 0.0 seconds.  Worse, all of these are required for full game completion, and often to absurd degrees - Wakka's ultimate weapon requires completing 200 games of Blitzball while Rikku's requires dodging lightning 200 consecutive times.  It's one thing to require a hefty grinding component of gameplay; it's another when the game makes no attempt to make it fun, instead just slow, tedious and, in the case of chocobo racing, infuriating.

But by far the most grevious of Final Fantasy X's flaws, at least in my eyes, is its storytelling component.  While I generally try to avoid talking about the story element in great detail in these reviews to avoid spoilers, I'd be doing a disservice by not mentioning it here.  Final Fantasy X's story, simply put, is awful.  The game's protagonists are the most generic of archetypes, with personalities that are bland at best to downright sociopathic at worst, which makes it awfully hard to care about their plights and get invested in the journey.  It certainly doesn't help that all the dialog and acting has a smarmy, cutesy tone to it that really grates on me, and they don't ever shut it off even in the story's serious moments.  In particular, I think of one scene:

Rikku's ancestral home is being burned to the ground and everyone she knows and loves is dying horribly.  And this is... amusing to you?

Other, substantial portions of the game's story simply don't make sense, either.  It is established early on that the spirits of the deceased must be sent to the afterlife in a ritual that only priestesses can perform, lest they become the mindless beasts that roam the world.  However, this idea is casually discarded at the midpoint with no satisfactory explanation - characters both good and bad can now die and come back at will, not mindless and in fact seemingly no worse for wear.  The big reveal of movers behind the game's plot was a twist I saw coming a mile away, and it only became more cringe-worthy after the later reveal that a character knew what was happening behind the scenes the whole time and said nothing.  This of course means he has a lot of blood on his hands as, should he have spoken up at any point prior to the bads making their move, he could have saved quite a few lives from being needlessly lost.  Even the moral dilemma of going through with the ritual anyway because literally no other weapon is shown to be capable of even harming Sin is handwaved away with a sappy deus ex machina that would make Hallmark cringe with its mawkishness.

Worse still is the fact that the game is just so full of itself, seemingly thinking it's carrying some great, groundbreaking and important message to the masses when in reality it's just treading once more down the whole "evil organized religion" plotline that, by 2001, had already been done to death across anime, manga, comics and video games.  Final Fantasy X brings absolutely nothing new or interesting to the concept, which is all the more baffling when one considers Squaresoft already did this idea in the past several times, and much better at that - Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII, Xenogears and Parasite Eve all indulged in similar themes and never once felt preachy doing it.

But the single most damning thing about this fiasco, in my eyes at least, is that I know this heavy-handed message isn't one delivered in earnest.  It's something far worse - a ploy thought up by Square's marketing department in an attempt to squeeze angsty atheist gamers for a quick buck by pandering to one of their hobby horses.  They wanted a game where a monolithic straw-man church pushes a hollow lie, a bunch of proudly mediocre vapid teenagers just like them immediately spot the bullshit, they solve the entire problem in a matter of days and get revered as heroes forever, and by god, Square delivered. Making a polished and fun game or writing a decent script with an earnest message was clearly not a priority here; earning an effortless buck for their rich (and in all likelihood, religious, conservative and heavily politically motivated) board of directors was.  Treating one's audience as easy marks is a bigger insult to my intelligence than any amount of underdeveloped design, and it's for that reason that this is one of my most despised Final Fantasy games.  Not the worst one, mind you, but it's certainly an experience I'm perfectly happy to never come back to.  If anything FFX's phony moralizing has had the exact opposite of its intended effect, because it got me thinking that if I ever feel the need to be talked down to by some sanctimonious hypocrite I can always go to church.  Think about it: if you're given a choice between paying 50 bucks to get constantly insulted over the course of 50+ hours or getting an hour's worth of condescension for as many weeks as you want for free, it only makes sense to pick the latter. Hey, at least church has free bread and grape juice; all you get with Final Fantasy X is a constant sense of shame every time you remember spending so much time and money on an irredeemable piece of trash that you're never getting back.

Oh and if you want the same game with the same story but actually done well, just pick up Grandia II.  Seriously, play it and marvel at how Squaresoft managed to rip off just about every character archetype, plot point and emotional beat from that game and make every single one of them worse; it's mind-blowing.

The one you thought was the worst Final Fantasy until you were proven SEVERELY wrong the following year.  And again eight years later.  And again ten years later.  And again eleven years later (twice!).

Developer: Square
Publisher: Square Electronic Arts, Square Enix
Platform: Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, PC
Released: 2001, 2002, 2013, 2015, 2016
Recommended version: If you must check it out, the more recent HD versions polish up the visuals and music and add some extra content, and both also come packed in with X-2, which I have heard is a closer match gameplay-wise to the older games in the series in that it has dedicated job classes and abilities reminiscent of games like Final Fantasy 5.

Hoshi wo Miru Hito

An obscure Famicom-exclusive RPG released only in Japan, overshadowed by other releases of its year in Final Fantasy, Phantasy Star and Dragon Quest II.  But does Another's only entry to the genre prove to have some merit, or is this one mostly forgotten for a reason?

I do my best to find something positive in each game I review; even if I don't personally enjoy playing it, there is usually at least one element I can point to and say "well, at least this was decent".  But with that in mind, I feel I can safely say that Hoshi wo Miru Hito (which translates to "Stargazers" or, more literally, "Those who look at the stars") is a rare example of a game that I can find no redeeming qualities in whatsoever.  I make this claim without hyperbole - Hoshi is a fundamental failure of game design in almost every way it possibly can be.

It doesn't take long to see a few of its flaws, either. The rigid tile-based and overly busy visuals give the game a very messy and cluttered look that isn't appealing to look at in the slightest. That, paired with the wretched music that seems to hit a shrill note every other second and loops every twenty seconds or so, puts a bad taste in your mouth right out of the gate.

But unappealing aesthetics are only the tip of the iceberg of Hoshi wo Miru Hito's badness.  The game's design as a whole also shows several glaring flaws from the outset; there is no introductory sequence to get the player acquainted with the game's plot or setting (being entirely relegated to the manual - and inaccurate to boot), and the first town in the game, while only a step to the left of the starting point, is not visible on the map.  The game attempts to justify this by saying that it's a town of psychics who are masking their presence from the outside world, which in itself isn't a terrible idea; Zelda II actually features a very similar puzzle at one point in its story, requiring the player to decipher some clues and acquire an item to reach it.  However, having an invisible town as the first major location in the game - one's only refuge from a hostile world in its early hours - is an astonishingly boneheaded move.

But even putting that aside, the game as a whole is replete with amateurish flaws in almost every respect.  Unlike virtually other game of this type, the player begins with no equipment or money whatsoever, forcing them to fight monsters with their fists and pray they survive long enough to buy some equipment and items.  This proves to be a problem in itself as, owing to a bug, the first weapon the player can purchase actually lowers their attack power, making them all but worthless until it is replaced. Weapons also cannot be unequipped unless a new weapon is purchased, and once it does, the old weapon is discarded immediately, never to be seen again.  Reselling weapons - another staple of the genre - is out as well, as you don't get any of your money back once you upgrade your equipment.

I use the term "pray" in regards to the combat, because it too proves to be messily-designed to the point of inanity.  Again discarding a common RPG trope, there is almost no difficulty progression to the game's encounters - right from the get-go, it is possible to meet enemies well above the player's level who can easily stomp them into the dirt, or hit them with a paralyzing technique that has a 100% success rate, doesn't fade on its own, and can only be cured with a spell or relatively expensive item (both of which are out of reach at the start of the game).  There is no Run command and no immediate "Game Over" when all of the playable characters are incapacitated, either, which means that if the player encounters either of these enemies, they're forced to either slowly watch them whittle down their HP to nothing or just reset the game.

But even if one manages to endure all of that, the dungeon crawling experience proves to be just as incompetently handled.  Not only do the ridiculously difficult encounters continue into them, but keys aren't handled in the traditional RPG sense either.  Instead, the player must purchase expensive key cards to open each door they encounter, which are strictly one-use items.  Should you run out of them mid-dungeon, you can easily become trapped with no means of escape, forcing you to reset the game once again.  But more baffling is the fact that items required to finish the game aren't placed in traditional RPG chests, or even visually indicated at all - instead, the player steps on an unmarked space on the dungeon and the item is automatically added to their inventory, with the only clue to this occurence being a small sound effect (which, considering how bad the music is, can be easily missed if you mute your television or just aren't paying enough attention).

These on their own are all bad, but not deal-breakers, per se; one could theoretically adapt to them and make their way through the game in spite of its serious problems.  However, some embarrassing and, dare I say, amateurish flaws further mar the experience.  The most noticeable of these is the player's atrocious move speed, which causes them to move about the maps at a glacial space (roughly two tiles every second - ridiculously slow even compared to other contemporary games).  The battle screen inexplicably truncates the last digit from the playable characters' HP meters, leading to confusing moments like having 5 HP, taking 18 damage, and being left with 3.  There is no way to back out of a combat menu once a player enters it, committing them to use an item or spell if they go into that one by mistake (and if they don't have one to use, they end up wasting a turn).  Exiting any location in the world, regardless of where it is, puts you back at the game's starting point, which results in a lot of unnecessary and frustrating backtracking when you're trying to advance through the game in any kind of logical fashion.

But Hoshi wo Miru Hito's most egregious and fatal flaw has nothing to do with its gameplay itself, but with a fundamental aspect of the genre as a whole.  The game utilizes passwords to save the player's progress through the game; an outdated design element even at the time of its release as games were rapidly moving into battery or disk backup solutions as a means to mitigate player frustration.  But even if the player copies down the password perfectly and puts it in after they die, and no matter where they saved or how far in the quest they'd gotten, they restart at the beginning of the game at level 0.  Oh, they might not have to find a few items or visit some key locations again, but they have to restart the entire game-spanning process of building up their character from scratch again, hoping all the while that a random encounter doesn't wipe them out and set them back to zero.  I cannot stress enough how much tedium, length and sheer frustration this adds to the game experience; it essentially turns the entire game into a very long test of luck, rather than any legitimate skill, problem-solving or patience, and I'd honestly be amazed if anyone has ever completed it without utilizing cheats or save-states.

In all honesty, there's not much I can say to conclude this review that hasn't already been said about Hoshi wo Miru Hito; it's a frustrating, poorly-planned experience with a number of grievous flaws, but its broken save system is easily the worst of all, rendering the game all but unbeatable in its unmodified form.  I should note, however, that in spite of everything, the game is a small cult hit in Japan, inspiring several improvement patches that, among other things, fix a few of the more egregious bugs, improve the graphics to more Famicom-esque standards and put in a functional save system that even tracks the player's equipment and levels.  There is even a full fan remake for the PC, released for free, which polishes up the game to modern standards in every respect and even includes a proper final boss battle - something else conspicuously absent from the original game.  So, while I can personally see no good in this mess, there are clearly some gamers out there who can.

Developer: Another
Publisher: HOT-B
Platform: Famicom
Released: 1987
Recommended version: N/A

"Stargazer", the fan remake of Hoshi wo Miru Hito (currently only available in Japanese)

Phantasy Star Gaiden

A Japanese-exclusive Phantasy Star title, released exclusively for Sega's Game Gear.  But were western gamers missing out on a hidden gem, or is this one spinoff game that should just be left in obscurity?

Anyone with a serious interest in JRPGs at least knows about Sega's Phantasy Star franchise.  It proved to be a hit on the Master System and had three Sega Genesis sequels which brought a lot of innovations to the table and had a highly imaginative setting with some dark themes, giving some unique flair to what was at the time a pretty niche genre.

In the four-year gap between Phantasy Stars 3 and 4, however, Japan got a slew of unique additions to the series that most westerners were unaware of until many years later.  There was Phantasy Star Adventure, a point-and-click adventure title with some light RPG elements which told a side-story occurring at roughly the same time as Phantasy Star II.  There were also the Phantasy Star II Text Adventures, a series of eight games in the same vein that gave slightly more back-story to the eight playable characters of Phantasy Star II and expanded that game's setting.  Finally, there was Phantasy Star Gaiden, an off-shoot of the first game (though it's not evident at the start) taking place aboard the space colony of Copto and following the adventures of two new characters - Alec and Mina - as they try to prevent the return of the evil being Cablon.

That's all good, but the game is hampered right out of the gate by some dated design decisions.  First, the game is easily the most grind-heavy of any of the Phantasy Star titles, requiring the player to spend significant amounts of time fighting enemies in order to gather enough gold to upgrade equipment.  While this was relatively standard (and even excusable) in RPGs of the 1980s, it was beginning to be phased out by the time the '90s rolled around, as technology was beginning to allow for lengthier games without having to rely on artificial ways to lengthen the experience.  Even the Final Fantasy Legend (SaGa) games on the Game Boy downplayed grinding in favor of randomized stat and character growth, so to see it in a 1992 game is a bit disappointing.

The game also suffers from uneven difficulty on the whole, with some later dungeons actually having lower-level enemies than the ones that came before them.  This left me frustrated on more than one occasion, as I had to spend a substantial amount of time grinding to survive one area, only to enter the next and be confronted by much weaker enemies than I'd defeated previously, which strikes me as lazy/bad design in general.  Game balance in the game overall leaves something to be desired, particularly in the later dungeons, where the length of the dungeon and the overall difficulty of the enemies is engineered to deplete the player's resources and leave them unable to defeat the boss, no matter how much they level up beforehand.  It got to the point where I just took to filling up my inventory with battle-escaping items and using them every time I got into a fight so that I could conserve my resources for the bosses.

Disappointingly, the game also regresses to the original Phantasy Star game's design in many ways.  The party is limited to three characters (Mina, Alec and a third character who appears as the story dictates) and enemies appear in groups of two at most.  Granted, screen space on the Game Gear is limited, but at a time when Phantasy Star III had five-character parties and the Game Boy had RPGs that allowed for a four-player party and sizable enemy groups of 3-5 enemies, it makes the more powerful platform feel surprisingly limited in comparison.

In the end, Phantasy Star Gaiden fails to live up to the quality standards of its namesake, providing a very mediocre RPG experience with little to distinguish it other than its name and a few elements of its setting.  It may have been a passable, if unremarkable, attempt at a portable RPG in 1992, but as technology grew and standards for the genre vastly expanded with a series of major hits in the early to mid `90s, Gaiden was destined to be forgotten.  This, paired with the fact that it seems to have been retconned out of canon with Phantasy Star IV's plot being reworked over its development period, means that this is a title whose sparse scraps of value will only be seen by the most die-hard fans of the series.

Developer: Japan System Supply
Publisher: Sega
Platform: Game Gear
Released: 1992
Recommended version: N/A

Persona 5

Persona 5 had a tough act to follow after two major hits in Personas 3 and 4, and the long wait for it certainly got fans' hopes up.  But does it rekindle the series' flames of ingenuity, or has the magic just been lost after nine years?

The Persona series has a complex history, beginning in the Playstation era as an off-shoot of the Shin Megami Tensei series that saw a low-key North American release in the console's early days.  It later got a Japanese-exclusive sequel in Persona 2: Innocent Sin, which itself got a sequel in Eternal Punishment (which saw a US release right away while its prequel had to wait nearly a decade for one, leaving many North American players confused by its storyline).  But the series truly made a splash with Persona 3, a late-era Playstation 2 game that separated itself from its predecessors storyline-wise and completely changed up the format, combining elements of school sims and dungeon crawlers together in a rather clever way - the more the player would advance their relationship with in-game characters, the more powerful they would become for the dungeon-crawling aspect of the game.

Persona 4 continued that idea, polishing up the gameplay while putting much more emphasis on the characters, giving each of them an individual story arc admist the ovearching plot of a murder mystery and exploring a strange alternate world.  The player was no longer the only beneficiary of advancing once's social connections - the playable characters along the way would also gain new benefits, such as follow-up attacks, the ability to survive a single fatal hit or, at maximum level, their Personas would transform into a new form, gaining more power and usually losing their elemental weaknesses.  A logical step up from 3 in most respects, but a welcome one.

Persona 5 once again continues in Persona 3's vein, largely retaining its style of gameplay while attempting to reintroduce some elements of earlier games in the franchise.  Nuclear and Mind spell elements make a return here, as do characters having a secondary gun weapon that can attack multiple enemies in a round.  Perhaps most surprising, though, is the fact that it restores some traditional Shin Megami Tensei elements to the mix - demons are no longer simply acquired via cards or fusions, but also via the series' traditional negotiation system - one must bargain with demons by choosing the right options during dialog, and occasionally gift them items or money to convince them to join the player's ranks.

A few new ideas have also crept their way into Persona 5's design.  Being a game themed around thievery and heists, the primary dungeons in the game now take the form of "castles", with the player encouraged to utilize stealth to evade traps, find hidden passages, solve puzzles and hide around corners to ambush enemies.  Each time they are sighted, an alert level will rise for the dungeon, making enemies more on-guard and aggressive.  Routes through them are also considerably more convoluted, generally requiring the player to snake their way through vents, atop walls and ledges and through mazes of laser traps.  One also cannot return to a given castle once it is completed, though there is a randomly-generated dungeon called "Mementos" that grants opportunity for the player to level up, gain new items and complete sidequests between the main quests.  That all sounds interesting, but the gameplay as a whole is hampered by the fact that Persona 5 has the Ocarina of Time problem - the game explains out every single puzzle and gameplay mechanic in great detail, to the point where they feel like they're often included to simply waste time and prolong the experience with empty busywork rather than provide any kind of legitimate, satisfying problem-solving on the player's part.

At first glance, Persona 5 also appears to take a much darker turn with its storytelling.  The main character is depicted as a delinquent on probation for a vague past incident, and his first encounters with nearly everyone are markedly unpleasant, with them dismissing him as a criminal and seemingly ready to have him locked up for the slightest infraction.  The game even opens in medias res with a scene depicting him being captured by the police, aggressively beaten and then grilled by a prosecutor about vague past actions (which gets called back to many times throughout the experience), hinting at some skeletons in his past that justify the general attitude toward him, or possibly events that have yet to be portrayed in the game's narrative. The villains take a much more sinister twist as well, with themes like sexual abuse, exploitation and, most shockingly, attempted suicide quickly creeping into the story.  The only break from this, at least at first, seems to come in the form of the other world the protagonists stumble into, which gives them an escape from their bleak reality into one where they have strange powers and use them in pursuit of revenge against their real-life enemies.  This had the potential to set the protagonists up as power-high vigilantes taking revenge against those they perceived to have wronged them, eventually crossing a line and becoming perceived as a threat to society as a whole (hence the framing device with the prosecutor character) - effectively, they could be antiheroes or even outright villains, albeit ones with a relatable motive that makes the player want to see them succeed in spite of the collateral damage they cause.

However, the writers seems to have quickly gotten cold feet in that regard; not long after the first chapter's conclusion, they largely backpedal on the idea and put up a much clearer with the protagonists becoming the 'lovable misfits' and the villains quickly devolving into shallow, cartoonish straw man with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.  Virtually no thought is given to any potential negative consequences for the main characters' actions either, and the game never even thinks to show there might be any - none of the people they target have family members or dependents or important positions in society or even friends who might suffer from said person presumably going to off themselves right after the heroes are done with them; it's just treated as another victory for the so-cool, so-righteous Phantom Thieves.  Basically, you're supposed to root for a gang of self-serving sociopaths just because the people they target are irredeemable scum with no humanity whatsoever and they look slightly better by default.  Hell they even have the gall to have one group of villains be vigilantes following in their footsteps, just with the added touch of thrill-killing people they don't like, and the game denounces their actions but not those of the protagonists; because you can drum up hate, bully people into self-harm and inspire people into becoming the worst kind of violent criminals, but never pulling the trigger yourself technically means you've got clean hands and a clear conscience, right?  I'm sure ol' Chuck Manson would be proud at your line of reasoning.

Now don't me wrong, there's nothing inherently wrong with antiheroes; hell there's some really great ones.  Max Payne, Asterion, Jin Sakai, Cloud Strife, Lelouche Lamperouge and Guts (just to name a few off the top of my head) are all complex characters with relatable motives.  Hell, even Tony Montana had his nobler traits; one of them even famously leads to his downfall.  But for it to work, your protagonist has to be interesting and you have to empathize with them on some level - take that away and you've got no reason to care anymore.  Persona 5 doesn't give me any reason to care about its protagonists - they're almost entirely deficient of the charm and strong personalities present in Persona 3 and 4's cast, instead largely fitting into broad-brushed character archetypes - the artist, the athletic character, the quirky and introverted computer whiz, the shallow fashionista, and so on.  While they do get some laughs at times, it is disappointing to see them rarely ascend beyond their basic traits, which I think in large part comes down to the game's general premise. By quickly labeling the main characters as misfits, they closed off much of the opportunity they had to interact with other, more "normal" characters within the game's world on any interesting level.  However, that could have easily lent itself to some interesting drama by exposing the player to the difficulties the characters would have balancing their mundane daily lives with their nightlife as masked vigilantes.  Key words here being "could have", because there is virtually nothing along those lines in the game aside from barely being acknowledged in a throwaway joke or two.  In fact, the social links are mostly just said characters enabling one another and cheering on their weird isolating behavior, so they never really feel like they grow as characters - a very stark and sad contrast to Persona 4's brilliant character building.  Morgana is perhaps the worst element of this whole experience, though, quickly going from "mildly charming" to "making the player want to strangle him" as he offers insipid commentary for every single action you take throughout the game and constantly stops you from pursuing social links and minigames in favor of... passing time to the next day and doing nothing.  Boy, what an efficient and not-at-all frustrating way to blaze through large swaths of limited game time AND bar you from enjoying its most interesting elements!  

With all that said, it really is a shame that all the high-quality art design in the game goes to waste on such a godawful concept.  Persona 5 sports very impressive production values, with much flair and polish even in its mundane elements - the game's menus sport bright, vivid colors, flashy fonts and chaotic art design, character portraits and cut-ins during dialog are all animated, and finishing battles with an all-out attack results in a eye-catching pinup shot with a visual style heavily reminiscent of a Gainax anime.  The narrative is also punctuated with fully-3D cutscenes for key moments, and nearly every story-relevant scene is fully voiced by big-name actors. Battles themselves immerse themselves in the game's high production values as well - every demon the player encounters has their own complement of voiced lines and full combat animations, and winning fights results in a stylish animation of the protagonists gathering and running/driving off to their next goal.  One can easily tell that this was the Atlus art team's most ambitious project to date, and the sheer amount of effort present shows off how Japanese RPGs can truly stand out and be distinct in the HD era.  However, it can become distracting at times, particularly when a character is trying to navigate around a town or dungeon and are constantly beset by NPC word bubbles covering the screen or repeated bits of inane dialog from the main cast.

Of course, the soundtrack is another of Persona 5's major highlights.  Series veteran Shoji Meguro returns once more to give the game a distinct and non-traditional soundtrack, this time incorporating elements of acid jazz and hard rock with some surprisingly spot-on English pronunciation in their lyrics despite being performed by Japanese singers.  These lend to the overall off-beat atmosphere and, paired with the flashy interface and visual effects of battle scenes, ultimately give the game a very mesmerizing feel when the story reaches its tensest moments.

Overall, Persona 5 can best be described as a step forward for the series in some respects and a huge step back in other, more important ones.  While it makes a strong first impression with its heavily-stylized presentation and darker bent, the fact that they seemed to be afraid to commit to a darker turn for the Persona series and quickly turned it into a trite good-versus-evil (or evil-versus-cartoonish-evil) story hangs a cloud of disappointment over the rest of the game.  This only gets further compounded by the fact that its writing quality has taken several steps backward from earlier titles, its premise is derivative and hackneyed (just a hack spin on Psychonauts with none of the clever humor or empathy) and its overall design and themes feel generally "kiddified" and dumbed-down to reach a wider audience; especially thematically.  There's nothing wrong with reusing a format that works, but without building on what came before, pushing new boundaries and having a single likable person to cheer for, the game quickly stagnates, becoming boring and unspeakably depressing once you realize that the more impressionable people who play it will soon adopt it as their new life policy and we'll have a whole new generation of internet vigilante 8channers and Kiwi Farms chuds on our hands.  Persona's 5 feels like the first step down a very dark road, and I'm sad to say that, judging from the general quality trend of most Atlus IPs since the Sega buyout, I doubt it'll be the last.

Developer: Atlus
Publisher: Atlus
Platform: Playstation 3, Playstation 4
Released: 2017
Recommended version: Both versions are largely identical, though the Playstation 4 version runs in a higher resolution and framerate compared to the Playstation 3 (1080p60 vs 720p30) and the Playstation 3 has substantially longer load times.  Both also have slightly different (cosmetic) DLC available for download.