Roundup 1

9 November 2023

Been a bit! Here's some quick impressions on stuff i've finished!

Man that samurai remnant review took me out a bit. i had a lot of fun writing it but needed to clear my thoughts with some actual #media ever since, and oh man ive been doing a lot lol. So this post is gonna be me going over some of the stuff i've been playing and watching the past month-ish cuz i wanna share my EXPERIENCES and i have some stuff to say about a couple things here. So here we go!

Final Fantasy VII Remake

FF7R is one of the weirder AAA games ive played through in the last few years. its a game that feels a bit stuck between the graphical rut of AAA games and the creative business unit i's throughline of FF combat from OG 7 onwards. its by no means a bad game at all, it's really funny, stupidly pretty, incredibly well acted and has a really interesting viewpoint of how it looks into the legacy of ff7 proper that im very excited to be expanded upon in rebirth and the third game. but the actual game feels a bit padded in ways, especially the dungeons that, while beautiful, feel overly long and dry despite their visual splendor.

the best part of the game that's not the genius implementation of ATB into an action game is the actual world of midgar for me though. chapters 3, 10 and 14 let you actually explore the slums in such an immersive way that it made me actually 100% all the sidequests, which i fucking hate doing, solely because i really wanted to do more stuff in the world. i can't wait for rebirth to expand on this with all the dumbass towns the larger world has to offer, its gonna be great.

Spider-Man ps4 and miles morales (and a bit of 2)

i wanna preface this by saying that i havent played a single ratchet and clank game or a spyro game made by insomniac, so their spiderman series is my first exposure to them and i left both games positive but mixed. sm ps4 is a Fun(tm) game that really knows what it wants to be and doesnt try anything else. It has a very boring open world filled with tedious activities and kinda boring side missions i stopped engaging with halfway through, and a combat system that has an interesting foundation but doesnt have the mechanics or enemy variety to make it shine. that Fun(tm)-ness is what's at the core of the insomniac spiderman trilogy. they're fun games to play through in the moment and have some generally alright story but are bogged down by their prestige-branded experience that sony keeps trying to push out the door. ps4 and miles's scripts are both ass, and it's a miracle that the stories are still as alright as they are when they're written like that. 2 is a bit better in that department and Harry actually makes Peter have a dynamic that's not as one-sided or gimmicky as the one he had with mj and miles. it's weird to say but that's kinda where the writing fails to me, its just so generically Fine that i ended up forgetting most of it.

miles felt a lot more polished in the gameplay at least even if the script was bad. it's no wonder sm2 expanded the venom power system more since it actually makes the lame and simplistic combat bearable by letting you pull out cool lil super attacks. I did miss the gadget wheel even if it makes more sense to not have a huge repertoire of those here compared to peter's.

sm2 is a technical marvel and a way better Game than the other two, to the point i feel that it makes those two obsolete on a gameplay level. the open world shit feels a lot less annoying to do since the upgrade materials that they give are simplified and the activities are not as long as the fucking base missions in ps4. i havent beaten the game yet but i think most of the additions to the combat and all of the additions to swinging are good, especially when it relates to speed and movement with the latter (i love u PS5's ssd mwah). i might write a bit more about sm2 when i beat it idk.

the coffin of andy and leyley (aka the third best game of the year)

gonna cut straight to the point here: the coffin of andy and leyley is one of the most interesting games to have come out this year. while it being on early access means i cant really comment on the plot as a whole, the current EA build has me under its spell.

incredible and impressive number of unique CGs, generally good music and a stupidly impressive script has its hooks on me. i love how andrew and ashley's relationship plays out through the two routes in episode 2, and i really liked the subtle horror of ashley's dependency on andrew and how pathetic andrew's reliance on ashley made their fucked up relationship work. really excited for the full game next year

also its sicko as fuck and i approve

resident evil 2 (the remake)

my only other experience with resident evil are my two playthroughs of resi 4. resi 4 is one of the best games of all time, and i was very excited to see what capcom had in store for their remake of 2 which had some really high praise from normal reviewers and my friends. suffice to say it's one of my favorite games this year (in hardcore mode only)

i think the beauty of resi2 hardcore is in its subversion of expectations. say you play the game like me, you do Leon standard. you go through his campaign learning the ins and outs of the rpd building and get scared by the zombies not going down on one hit or the lickers or the Mr. X section. you get tense, you scream, you do the sewers and get scared by the big monsters, you do the lab and get scared by the plants, you beat the game, yay! you did it!

then you go do claire hardcore and you immediately understand the game was just testing you. it was preparing you for the real horror: the horror of not having enough shit and all your shit being over/undertuned. take the weapons for example: leon gets two good pistols, a good shotgun, and a flamethrower. a generally well balanced roster of situationally aware weaponry that you'll always get a use of, and more importantly, always have available at a moment's notice. claire is not like that at all. you get two revolvers that suck ass, a stupidly good grenade launcher, a good machine gun and a single pistol, that's it. claire also doesn't get enough ammo for these weapons, and most of the pistol ammo you'll find in the game is for the terrible quick shot revolver that sucks ass and barely deals damage. this, however, is balanced by the fact that this is probably your second run, so you know more or less where the key items are at, what zombies to avoid or kill, how to find the scattered green herbs and pouch upgrades, so you go "hey its fine, i know where most stuff is, it'll be ok."

its not ok.

claire has to deal with the bulking giant Mr. X far earlier and more frequently than Leon did. While you're exploring the second floor of the east wing, he appears from around a corner, and you have to deal with him while finding the three medallions for the underground section AND the search for the electric boxes. so while you, as a player, already have the game knowledge to route most of the way through the station, you have to deal with enemies that deal way more damage, not having enough resources to survive, having to deal with limited save items in the form of ink ribbons and, and this is key, not having enough item slots to carry everything you want. claire's second run was one of the most stressful experiences ive ever had with a game, let alone a horror game. the sheer dread you're always finding yourself in was such a fantastic and unique experience that elevated the kinda mid leon run into an all timer for me. defo one of the best games ive played this year.

alan wake remastered

then alan wake 2 came out. at the time of writing this ive not played AW2; i hadnt even played the original game or any of remedy's catalogue aside from half a playthrough of max payne 1 on ios. however, AW2's supposed media-mix venture into playing with formats and the sheer amount of Horsepower required to run the game on pc made me really curious about it, and hey i already had AW1 and control on ps5 thanks to playstation plus, so i decided to take a plunge into this remedyverse right after resi 2.

alan wake is not a good game.

i think AW is a game that suffers a lot from its ambition and the hellscape that was 7th gen gaming. the game was in dev hell and had to be rebooted into a linear thriller that was horror-themed instead of a horror game and man you can tell. while the core gameplay feels coherent, it lacks the enemy variety to make it shine, and the lack of good weapons or actual progression ruined it a lot for me. you spend most of the game slowly walking through dark forests with boring enemies and middling level design while the game tries to tell an interesting story that left me wanting more. i think the ideas it presents are interesting but it really needed more time in the oven to get the script working. im currently in the middle of control which is a way tighter game and im very interested to see how they retconning of alan wake into that SCP-esque thing works out, but the game itself is just really dull. a shame, really.

still gonna play aw2 when it's not 60 fucking dollars though

the movie project

dont confuse this with me actually making a movie lmao im not built for that shit. due to some (not negative) circumstances in my life that have happened over the last week i took it upon myself to start watching more movies, mainly because i noticed i didnt go to the cinema a single time through september and that made me feel like ass, so ive been watching one movie a day over the last week, mainly some stuff ive been meaning to get to for a while but never found the time or urgency to do so.

so far ive watched 8 movies, 6 full length ones, one short film and a documentary. ill give a one paragraph review of each because they deserve to be talked more at length and this is running long as it is.

• Nope (dir. Jordan Peele, 2022): good movie about animal abuse and spectacle. the more i think about it the more i like it. the cast is really good and the script manages to capture the heaviness of the subject while still being funny. the monkey scene will not leave my head

• Videodrome (dir. David Cronenberg, 1983): american denpa. like nope i like it more in hindsight than while i watched it. the commentary is still applicable to modern day and the dread it instills in the viewer was phenomenal. im really mad that james woods is a good actor

• Eraserhead (dir. David Lynch, 1977): a movie about the sounds of the street at 12am. a movie about the weird clanking that comes from your upstairs neighboor and the weird way the pipes sound at 8am. a movie about how you wanna sleep but the power generator outside makes a buzzing sound you cant shake off and it annoys you. pretty fantastic

• nausicaa and the valley of the wind (dir. Miyazaki Hayao, 1984): i started a miyazaki marathon to prepare myself to watch "How do you live" (im not calling it by the english name and you cant make me). miyazaki's obession with how we interface with nature and technology is so good, and the textured feel of the machines and the insects made it a really immersive watch for me.

• Castle in the Sky (dir. Miyazaki Hayao, 1986): like nausicaa, its a film obsessed with the interfacing between machines and nature, but also about how we treat the cultural history of indigenous people through colonialism and how we deal with that history. i can't get the pirate airship out of my head.

• My Neighbor Totoro (dir. Miyazaki Hayao, 1988): a nice, comfy movie i watched with japanese subs and it might have been a mistake because the old woman was almost unintelligible to me. i love big chungus totoro and satsuki was p cute too. miyazaki has a real handle on how to capture the scenery and feel of a place, be it rural japan, a fantasy postapocalypse or a castle in the sky and it's incredible to see it come to life every time. didnt like it as much as the others but it was fun

• The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (dir. Wes Anderson, 2023): this was my first wes anderson movie and i really really liked it. framing the story in narration through visual theatre was great and it looks gorgeous. defo gotta watch his actual full length films later

• The Dark, Sad Story of Boogie2988 (dir. Mike Clum, 2023): i have never seen a more depressing documentary about a single person in my life

so yeah that was pretty much everything ive done since. after i finish control im probably gonna get to finishing up some of my japanese games like King Exit and the tsukihime remake, probably start yakuza 7 and nier replicant too. ill write about those too when the time comes but if you managed to get here after that big-ass post, i wanna thank you for reading my insane ramblings and hope you got a recomendation out of these.

until next time!