By Edlund Gerard

They explain the origin of Adam Jensen’s prosthetics through a tutorial that teaches you the basic mechanics of the game. Then we’re off! We are flooded with missions, side quests, social interaction, loot, and crazy conspiracy theories. Deus Ex H.R. is never short of things to do.

Difficulty levels don’t really matter too much. Even when on “Give me Deus Ex” difficulty, it is still quite easy. As a matter of fact I was quickly disheartened when I broke the game. As soon as I acquired a grenade launcher through the games story, I was able to defeat most bosses in 10 seconds.

Do not let that detract you from getting this game. It’s worth every penny. There are so many different ways to finish an objective and about 40 hours of content if you like to collect things and do side quests. There are tons of augmentation upgrades to make you stronger, faster, stealthier, and enough to get your hacking skills to Anonymous levels. With the right augmentations, I can hack terminals and gain access to enemy robots, turrets and cameras and turn that against them. You’ll find virus software that can aid you into getting past high level security. Modifying your weapons is also an excellent feature. I was able to take a lowly machine pistol, and turn it into the most powerful weapon in my inventory.

The soundtrack is wonderful and goes well with the pulse of the Deus Ex universe. Following programming 101, the tempo is raised anytime there could be an intense situation ahead. There are moments of definite raging where techno music seems so obvious, but it still feels like it belongs with the style of the game. The voice acting leaves something to be desired. Adam is a very typical gruff, emo, deadpan sounding individual and it screams “I’m cool!” There aren’t any silly one-liners, but that doesn’t save the game from the rest of the voiceovers. I understand the need to make a game with diversity given the storyline. But they try too hard with the voice acting, and I felt uncomfortable atsome points.

Even with the silly animations and the undesirable voice acting, I’m still begging for more. Most of the games story is told through hacked email accounts. Therefore I felt the need to see and collect absolutely everything. This game would be a perfect candidate for a New Game +. Unlocking a harder difficulty and keeping your modified weapons and body for a second play through would be more than enough to justify the price tag. But I do see more DLC on the horizon! Can’t wait!

This game gets a whopping: 8/10

I am a TEKKEN PHEEN! I need this. Specially after this trailer.

Watch it now!

Final Fantasy VII. It has been considered one of the greatest games of all time. If you have existed with the gaming community during the past 10 years, you would have at least heard of this game or logically deduced that Final Fantasy VII was somewhere between Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy XII. The game is greatly praised for practically every category that I consider in reviews. HOWEVER! Is this all true? Can it really be the greatest game of all time? Read on, young warrior, and attempt to find enlightenment in the largest review I have ever written!

Name: Final Fantasy VII
Game Ownership: Yes
Game Status: Beat last boss. Beat Emerald Weapon.
How it was Acquired: Bought it
Condition when Bought: Used
Game Type: Classic RPG

Preliminary Comments:
WARNING: Despite my best efforts, this review contains more spoilers than all other reviews that I’ve made. As highly unlikely as it is that you know nothing about this game in the almost 10 years that it has been out, if you do not want to have certain aspects of the game ruined, then stop reading.

Fact: This is not the Ultima Review that I had originally planned. However, it is the longest review I’ve ever done.

Fact: This game has been voted as “Best Game Ever” by Gamefaqs.com and is constantly called the greatest game ever made.

Rant: Tifa = HOT, Aerith = CUTE, Yuffie = PRESENT

Fact: Aerith is named Aeris in the American version, but I prefer the spelling Aerith.

Fact: Aeris is actually not pronounced “Air-iss,” but “Aries”.

Fact: Two extra, extremely hard bosses, Ruby and Emerald Weapon, were added to the American version of the game as well as an extra cinema scene depicting them and two other weapons escaping from the earth.

Fact: In addition, Sephiroth’s “Super Nova” move was lengthened by almost 5 minutes.

Rant: “Huh? Finger!? What the hell!?”

Rant: I read a poll once that said that this game did wonders for the hentai industry.

Rant: This is possibly the most grammatically-challenged game to ever reach such high status.

Rant: It also holds the title for being one of the least politically correct games ever as well.

FMV – Movie sequences, I think the letters stand for “Full Motion Video.”

Graphics – 7.5
Way back in the day, this was probably the most touted aspect of the game. Does anyone remember the commercials where they talked about all the people that they had to hire to work on this game or they showed the creation of the character models for the FMV sequences? No? Well then…

A major complaint of the game that I’ve heard is that most of the time you are not playing as the realistic models that you see in the FMVs. Instead, you are controlling little (chibi-ish?) avatars of your characters that look similar to “Lego” men. Many people complain about it, and I’ve even seen one account saying that Square conned the gamers by showing the good looking characters in the commercials but sticking players with the deformed versions with the good models coming out only during battle and certain FMV sequences. However, I don’t think they realize that it was the way Final Fantasy always was. Only in FF6 did Square start using the same sprites during battle in the overworld and towns. This could spark the question of why Square reverted backwards and not use the good models all the time. My guess would probably be Square’s previous inexperience with 3-D hardware coupled with space or processing limitations, but that’s just my guess.

The overworld map is a simple, completely 3-D environment, but towns, dungeons, and the like were implemented differently. While other games tried to make either a fully 2-D or 3-D environment with 2-D or 3-D characters, respectively, Square put the 3-D models in a 2-D world. Although not necessarily the first one to do so, it was a practice made more popular by this game that would be used by other games such as Resident Evil. The backgrounds and scenery are drawn very nicely and do have a good amount of depth. A criticism I have about it is how much the characters seem to clash with its backgrounds. Here we have a very nice picture, but have relatively silly, low-detailed, polygontal avatars running through it. It just didn’t feel right to me. Another criticism is how hard it is to navigate in these 2-1/2-D environments. A lot of times, you have no idea where a door is or where a path goes. The makers foresaw this and added in a finger to show where you are in the scene as well as arrows showing where the doors are (or consequently, what is a door) and where to go to go to the next area. However, another problem is that this game seems to change perspective a lot from area to area. There are times when you press up to go up, but move to the left instead. I’m sure there’s some technical explanation for this, but I still don’t see why they just couldn’t make up always go up.

This game is, to my knowledge, the first console game to use the full FMV sequence for parts of the game instead of just using the in-game models. I remember when everyone would marvel at these sequences and talk nonstop about how cool they are. Looking back, all of the FMV sequences (even the so-called “good ones”) look as stiff as Gumby cartoons. Considering that this was the first time Square used 3-D models in a game to begin with, the FMV sequences were pretty decent. Even so, there are two main problems with the sequences. The first problem was that the sequences had a high amount of inconsistency.

Let me explain: We all know about the famous scene where Aerith gets totally wasted by Sephiroth. If you watch the video closely, you can see from the different camera angles that many times the characters are facing different directions on the platform. First, it seems like Aerith is looking towards the entrance, then when she gets stabbed, she looks away, then she facing a side of it. Also, in the scene where Cloud puts Aerith’s dead body in the water, despite it shows that Cloud just waits there while her body sinks to the floor, when they show the view under the water, you don’t actually see Cloud wading at the top. There are several more of these instances in the game, and there is a website I found that explains all of them and even has pics, but I lost the link, and if I ever find it again, I could post it. Either way, I think that this reflects an overall laziness on Square’s part. Sure, their tools were limited, but I’m pretty sure that they could have paid more attention to where characters are facing or even their actual presence! It should be a given!

Some could argue that the last problem was really not much of a problem, but more of a minor nitpicky annoyance. However, there was a choice in the use of FMV sequences on Square’s part that made no sense. There are the FMV sequences that use the good anime character models, but a lot of other FMV sequences use just the little avatars. This in itself isn’t really that bad. In essence, they’re just making the actions of the avatars clearer to see with things like facial expression and smoother movement (Do you have any idea how long it took for me to realize that Porom was hitting Palom in FF2?). The real problem is that they use these avatars for some of the most important sequences in the game including Cloud falling off the Sector 5 Plate and Tifa and Cloud falling into the Lifestream. Here were two sequences that were supposed to have the player gasp and wonder what will happen next. Instead, the character is laughing at how ridiculous the FMV sequence looks with the avatars and totally kills the mood. The obvious question is why they didn’t just use the good models for all the movies? Was it just because it would have been more work?

The area where this game shines the most graphically is not in videos but in the heat of battle. Here, you can see the characters in all their full character model glory kicking/slashing/shooting the crap out of everything on the other side of the screen, which looks just as good. Unlike previous FF games, your characters actually run up to one another and hit each other! That in itself is trivial for the characters you control, but it is a world of difference for the enemy side. No longer do we just have one animation for ten generic attacking moves where the only difference was what it said in the text box. If a character is punching, we can see it! If it is chanting or powering up, we can see it! It’s almost life-changing! Ok, not really, but it’s still interesting. A nice detail that I liked was that the weapon a character holds in their hand changes depending on what is equipped instead of just being a generic sword. Unfortunately, this doesn’t apply to accessories or armor. Normal attacking and Limit Breaks (special moves which will be explained later) look pretty good in the game. However, magic in the game seems to be a mixed bag. On one hand, you have some moves that look great like Comet, but then you have moves that could have looked a lot better such as Fire or Ice moves. A move that looked really disappointing was Ultima. Now, with a name like Ultima, you’d expect a lot. It looked really cool in past FF games, but in this one, it…how do I say this…looks like a creamy orgasm. Yes, that is probably the worst comparison that I’ve ever made, but when I saw it, that’s immediately what I thought it looked like.

Perhaps the most impressive animation in the game is Summoning. When you actually call these monsters, you can see the immense power that they have and can truly feel their presence. It’s almost like a separate FMV each time you use one. Nothing beats a giant dragon shooting a laser beam from space or dragging an enemy into another dimension to get totally annihilated by a ton of monsters. However, the biggest problem is that they seem to have overdone it. You only really need to watch the move once or twice. After that, you just wanna get on with the battle. The problem is that a lot of these summon animations are very long and become boring after a while. The “Knights of Round” summon takes almost five minutes! They didn’t even put in a way to skip the animation. It’s like the makers were saying, “Hey! Look at this move! Isn’t it great? It’s so great that you’ll always wanna see it! Anyone who doesn’t hates kittens and ice cream!” or something like that.

Graphically speaking, they were revolutionary for their time, but they fail to hold up after all these years. Even when considering the graphics for that time, there were still graphics that could have been better done such as the overworld or magic. Also, the inability to skip some of the highly animated sequences is very annoying.

Sound – 7.5
One of the most popular aspects of the game, especially these days, is the soundtrack. I’ve heard tons of praise for this soundtrack and how amazingly great it supposedly is. With that said, why does sound only get a 7.5? It is because I don’t believe that the soundtrack is everything everyone says it is. Now, it’s not because the soundtrack didn’t use real instruments or some stupid argument like that. It’s because the music used some of the worst game synths ever made. I have no idea what Uematsu was thinking when he chose them. The argument that they didn’t have good technology can’t apply cause they did much better sounding music in Final Fantasy 8 using the same technology, and his work in FF6 and FF4 is some of the best of any game ever and that was only using 16-bit sound. I don’t know the technical parts of music like composition and what not, but I know what sounds good, and I know what doesn’t, and a lot of these songs don’t. Just listen to the “Final Fantasy” part of the ending theme and you’ll see how annoying the synths can be. It just makes it feel like I’m playing some horrible indy game with really bad midis. (“Final Fantasy” is the song that is in every FF game in some form that isn’t “The Prelude” or the victory fanfare. It was also in the ending of FF6 and in FF4 at the part where Kain and Cecil leave Baron for Myst)

With all negativity being said, I must say that this game is another testament to Uematsu’s ability to make music with “inferior instruments.” Even with the horrible synths, he did make some good songs such as Aerith’s theme and the infamous One-Winged Angel (though relatively overrated). Also, I must commend him on making an overworld theme that was so long that it didn’t become annoying and repetitive that quickly (even though this does change later in disc two and is exchanged for the worst overworld theme ever). Various other songs scattered around the game were also pretty good even though they aren’t very remembered (“On the Other Side of the Mountain,” “Underneath the Rotting Pizza,” and “On That Day Five Years Ago” for starters). Unfortunately, I feel that all of these songs, even the good ones, are held back by the bad synths. There is so much potential in this soundtrack, but unfortunately it just isn’t realized.

I would like to take this time to criticize the fighting themes in this game. Some of the songs came out fine like JENOVA and Jenova Absolute, but the others fell short. The normal fighting theme (called “Fighting” or “Those Who Fight”) is fine, and I think it is one of the better made songs of the game, but I always liked fighting themes to be a bit more exciting. I know that the song may be a bit less exciting in order to fit with the slower fighting style of the game, but it still didn’t feel right to me. However, I felt that this song could have taken place of that annoying, badly made “Hurry!” song used in timed escapes and such. The normal fighting theme sounds like it would fit some type of scenario involving a time limit. Next song on the chopping block is “Birth of God,” which plays when fighting Sephiroth’s first form. For a song that is for a very important and difficult looking boss like this one, it really doesn’t capture the mood at all. You can put this one in the “bad indy midi” file, cause it deserves it. How could Jenova Absolute, the boss right before that was much less important than the boss that followed it, have a more epic song than the first form of the final boss?

However, no song in this game disappoints me more than the normal boss song “Still More Fighting” (alternately called “Those Who Fight Further”). Don’t get me wrong, I actually like the song. However, that doesn’t save the fact that this is the song that the synths have butchered the most. The first ten seconds are good with the guitar playing as it hypes you up for what is about to come, but then the electric organ/piano noise kicks in, and suddenly any coolness this song had has gone down the tubes. It really sounds that awful. It continues to sound mediocre until near the end of the song, meaning that you have to deal with the bad instruments until the end of the song! This song probably wouldn’t be that bad if they had just used a better organ noise. There have been tons of remixes that have used real organs or or other instruments, and they sound a lot better. If you wanna see what this song should have sounded like, go get the cover by “The Black Mages,” which, ironically, Uematsu is a part of.

Sound effects are pretty good in this game. There isn’t much criteria to making good sound effects in a RPG game if there is no voice acting involved, but I think that this game did a pretty good job of adding into the atmosphere of the area or putting that “umph” into an attack. Not much else to say.

Story – 8.0
Let me just warn you now that if you wanna take a bathroom break or get something to eat or see that new Pink Panther movie, this would be a good time to do that before continuing.

We have now hit the high point of the game. Not only is a good story a staple of Final Fantasy games in general, but this story especially has a reputation for being one of the best stories ever featured in a video game. There have been many arguments on both sides on the quality of this story. Both sides have brought up good points, and both sides have shown off their psychotic love or hatred for it. I’ll attempt to hit on as many of those arguments in this review as I can.

Well, let’s discuss the story overall. It has all the trademarks a Final Fantasy game: a large complicated story, uneven character development, and antagonists that become as popular as the protagonists. Overall, I must say I did enjoy playing through the game’s story. I’ve always felt that there should be two factors to a good video game story: unpredictability and the feeling of advancement. In terms of unpredictability, this game certainly does a good job. It has many plot twists that keep things fresh and entertaining. The best thing about the twists is that a lot of them actually make sense in occurring. I’ve always hated how other games just suddenly throw in some completely random thing into the game and expect it to be good (Ancient Wu in True Crime: Streets of LA is a good example). In the feeling of advancement, it always feels good to look back when playing a game and see how far you’ve actually progressed and go “Wow! I did a lot of stuff!” Of course, the length of the game is a largely contributing factor, but it still doesn’t matter.

Next up is the characters. I must say that this game is probably the best Final Fantasy at giving at least some of their characters some depth. Other Final Fantasies you didn’t really care and just wanted to play the game, but the makers have done a good job at making these characters seem real. Just look at the amounts of praise and crappy poetry that get made just because Aerith died. No other video game character got that much praise for dying! Did anyone care when General Leo or Tellah died? No! Unfortunately, Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith are probably the three that have actually had the most development while the others have the problem of being “There” characters. A “There” character is a character that is just “there” to move stuff along. They don’t really contribute to anything, nor do they really matter that much. Examples of “there” characters include Yuffie, Cait Sith, or even Barret after the first disc. I think that their development was cut short in order to give the player a variety of characters to choose from throughout the game instead of having to have a certain character in the party all the time to develop, which I really can’t complain about since I’m willing to have a degree of mediocrity for some improvements in gameplay. It suffers a similar problem as in FF6, though FF6′s character development was a little more even.

I think that there are people out there that take the characters way too seriously. For example, a ton of social outcasts and disillusioned emo teenagers must have played this game, cause they love talking about how much Cloud reminded them of themselves: a brash, confused 21 year old guy who can’t control himself. A horrible stigma that has arisen in this game is how people now actually expect to relate to the main character. Now, I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing to relate to a video game character, but I’ve read a ton of reviews for other video games where they bash the characters just because they couldn’t find a personal connection. “Oh! Paper Mario was a good game, but Mario sucked as a character because his life isn’t as f***ed up as mine, not like Cloud! That was a good hero!” Now, I never actually saw someone say that for Paper Mario, but you understand the point I’m trying to make. I have seen reviewers do this in reference to Final Fantasy 9 though, and guess who’s name popped up.

Another case is the “Cult of Aerith” that seems to be running rampant. Seriously, if you looked at the ways that some of these guys took Aerith’s death, you’d see that they’d need professional help. Is it wrong to feel sad about her death? No. I don’t even think it was necessarily wrong to cry about it, though there isn’t any reason you should. However, if you’re lighting the candles to your “Flower Girl” memorial shrine every night, then you’ve probably gotta rethink some stuff in your life. I’ve read some crazy things regarding Aerith’s death including an account that said that Final Fantasy VII is an incomplete game because Aerith can’t be revived and another saying she had to die because of male chauvinism. I’m sorry to tell you this, but Aerith really isn’t that great. No one could really get a grasp on her personality because she died so suddenly, and what we did know was vague. They killed her off when we had fonder memories of her so that we couldn’t have anything to complain about later on. The only reason we think so highly of her is because she died, and that’s it. Well, she had the cuteness thing going for her too, but that only helps in certain areas…HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Something that I’d really like to discuss is Sephiroth. It seems like everyone loves Sephiroth. I think it’s because he doesn’t wear a shirt. However, I have to say that I really thought Sephiroth was a lame villain. He doesn’t seem to have any personality whatsoever. Whenever we see him, he just goes on about how great his power is and how he is superior to everything. He wasn’t even a hard last boss. Also, he seems to be as dumb as a brick. How come he only realised that he was different from other SOLDIERs because he saw the reactor? Couldn’t he have realized any of this before? Why does he suddenly decide to read the stuff at Shinra Mansion after this? Also, I hate how he just acts like an armchair villain throughout most of the game. He doesn’t really do much until you fight him at the end. Sure he uses a projection of himself and was involved with making Cloud think he was fake, but most of the time he doesn’t do anything. Not only that, but there isn’t very much delving into Sephiroth’s past. All we know is a vague idea of who is parents could be. Too much about Sephiroth remained undeveloped. This is a step back from the development of the FF6 villain Kefka, which was superb.

Now, let us look a little closer at this story. I’ve always been a fan of foreshadowing in storytelling, and this game uses a lot of it, especially in reference to Cloud’s past. Whenever Cloud asks Tifa about it, she always stutters or avoids the question. Also, whenever Cloud tells someone he’s from SOLDIER, there’s always some weird flash of light. You wouldn’t really catch all of these things until after you play the game through a second time, which I thought was a great aspect. It’s cool to play through the game another time and realise what all that weird stuff that was happening was.

Another aspect that I really liked in the beginning was the whole variable of who Cloud liked more, Aerith or Tifa (or even Yuffie in some cases). You’d be asked different questions and depending on what you answer back determines who you date when you go to the Gold Saucer. The thing that I didn’t like is that ultimately it doesn’t matter cause it only amounts to a date. After that, Aerith gets whacked and you’re kinda stuck with Tifa. This could have gone further, and even spurred different endings or something, but it didn’t and it remains in our minds as unfulfilled potential.

The story, overall, did a pretty good job at staying together, but there were several parts to the game that either weren’t clearly resolved or just didn’t make any sense at all. Let us start with the most popular event in the game, Aerith’s death, which was certainly the most emotional moment of the game that has left a major impact in many people’s minds. Of course, it is ironic that the event that put Aerith over Tifa in many minds is her death, but so be it. Unfortunately, what is one of the biggest plot devices in FF7 is also one of its biggest plot-holes. How exactly does Aerith die so easily? This applies to General Leo before her in FF6, and Tellah before that in FF4. Why don’t they just use a Phoenix Down? Some say that it’s because Phoenix Downs only revive those that are unconscious and not dead. To that I say, then why are there game overs then? If they’re just unconscious, why can’t we just wait for them to become conscious again and keep playing? It doesn’t make sense! Another argument that I’ve heard is that simply, “Dude! She got stabbed in the stomach! People die after getting stabbed in the stomach, duh!” Of course you would die from getting stabbed in the stomach, but it doesn’t make sense in this world of FF7. We see characters get shot, thundered, fired, iced, nuclear blasted, stabbed, poisoned, transformed, and many other things, but they only lose a measily few HP. Now suddenly we’re supposed to believe that she can die just from something as simple as getting stabbed by Sephiroth? I’m sorry, but I think the only reason Aerith died was to be a cheap way to gather emotion, and obviously it has worked.

There are a lot of other various plot holes such as how Barret escaped from Shinra after Dyne fell off the cliff or why we’re stopping Shinra from getting huge materia. I never understood the huge materia thing at all. If Shinra was gathering them to launch into Meteor and save the world, why are we stopping them? The story at a lot of times seems very shallow and unclear. In fact, they had to put in times where Cloud would actually tell you what is going on just so that you’d know what you’re supposed to do. After the first disc, the story goes downhill until the part where Tifa and Cloud fall into the lifestream, and then it just goes back downhill after that.

Other than that, the story had another big problem in translation. Now, this game wasn’t totally censored like the past Final Fantasy games, and FF7 was actually the first FF game not to be censored (except for some strange instances which didn’t make any sense). However, the problem was with something that was very elementary, grammar and spelling. This game has the worst grammar of any other game ever. You know all the crap people give about FF4′s bad translation? It doesn’t compare to this. I’m talking about sentences that actually say, “Good Morning! Cloud!”, “Beacause. you are…a puppet”, and “This guy are sick”. If these were a few isolated incidences, it wouldn’t be such a problem, but it occurs so often that it really does hurt the game. Also, the characters seem to have a lot of pointless conversations that don’t make any sense:

Tifa: Don’t you just hate this?
Aerith: You’re probably right.
Cloud: …Hmm. That’s how you’ll fool them.
Aerith: …….Hmmmmmmmmm. So that’s how you fooled them.

Quite possibly the biggest criticism about the game is how vague the story seems to be. Probably the vaguest thing in the game is the ending. You don’t really ever know if Meteor will kill everyone or if Holy will kill everyone or if nothing will kill everyone. Even the cinema scene after the credits (the credits looked really boring by the way) doesn’t really say if every person survived or not. The ending has come under fire by a lot of people who wanted to know what really happened. However, I kinda like how the ending never told you what happened because it leaves you wondering. It’s certainly different from the past FF’s where you know the bad guy dies and everyone is still alive and the world gets rebuilt and so on. Of course, Advent Children kinda cleared all the questions about it up (everyone’s still alive, jenova is still there, everyone gets infected with stuff), but it was fun while it lasted. Advent Children does open up another plot hole though. Holy was supposed to cleanse the earth of everything that could harm it, so why are there still Jenova remnants? Why do Kadaj and the other two guys still exist? Why does Jenova’s head still exist? These questions are never answered in the movie or in the game, which just causes more confusion.

Even without the ending FF7 was still vague for the reasons previously mentioned. There are two sides that address the issue: those that felt the game was amazingly deep and philosophical, and those that thought the game was just some string of events that leaves you confused as to what just happened. To the latter, does everything have to be spelled out for you? Seriously, a lot of FF7 could be explained if you just pay attention to what people are talking about or if you just sat down and thought a little about it. A lot of the criticisms I’ve read about vaguity resulted from people who either didn’t find the extra stuff that explains certain parts of the story or didn’t pay attention when it was being explained. That seems to be a problem with gamers today, no imagination at all. To the former, the reason you think FF7 is deep is because you perceive it to be deep. FF7′s story itself has so many unanswered questions and missing parts that the player’s own imagination fills in the gaps. FF7 is probably the most variable and hollow game in existance where everything can be made into what you want it to be. If that statement and the gameplay in battle doesn’t convince you, then I don’t know what will.

I ultimately felt that the main story was good, but it has so many small problems and large plot holes that it ultimately misses the mark on being a truly great story. Extreme fan assessments of “OMG DA STRY L33TZRZ LOL!” don’t really help either. I didn’t think that the story was good enough to get a score like 9, but it is still one of the better video game stories I’ve seen, thus netting it an 8.

Before we move on, I would like to cite some similarities I’ve noticed between FF6 and FF7 regarding the last boss fight. First, before you actually fight both bosses, you have to go through several other stages before you fight the final boss. In FF6, you had to fight the tiers of the tower to get to Kefka. In FF7, you have to fight Bizarro Sephiroth while switching teams to attack different parts. Also, notice how in both games when you do get to Kefka/Sephiroth that you always fight in a heavenly place that has a lot of clouds. Also, both bosses enter from the top of the screen, and both bosses look like some kind of transcended being. Also, when they are both defeated, they dissolve away. Is there a coincidence?

Fun – 7.0
Let’s begin with what you’re gonna be doing most of the time in this game other than plowing through the massive amounts of dialouge: fighting. Fighting is patterned as it always is, your team has to fight the team of enemies and kill them. Some key differences include how now you only get to use three people in battle, which I guess is due to graphical and processor limitations. The Active Time Battle (ATB) system is still present, meaning you need to make your decisions quickly or get attacked by the enemies. Your characters also have special desperation attacks now called “Limit Breaks.” Unlike in FF6 where you’d see them once in a blue moon, there is a separate bar that fills up whenever a character takes damage. When it is full, you get to use a high-damage special attack. The amount the bar fills up is related to how much HP is lost, so these moves don’t occur very often. Magic and summons are always present as well as extra abilities that can be enabled with materia.

Oh! That’s right! You don’t know what materia is yet. The Materia System is the new system in FF7 where your characters learn spells. When your character equips materia, that character will have the knowledge of how to do a variety of spells such as fire/ice/lightning spells, summons, stealing from people, and all that stuff. In order to make the materia spell stronger, you gains experience points for materia (called AP) in order to gain more powerful spells. The amount of materia you can equip on one character depends on how many slots their weapons and armor have for materia. The interesting thing about materia is that any type of materia can be equipped on any character. You could make someone like Cloud go from an attacking powerhouse to a magic master to a summoner to a thief to anything. Also, if the materia has already been leveled up, it doesn’t need to be leveled up from the beginning if equipped to a different person.

The problem that this creates is that it makes the characters lose their specialty. In past FF games, each character had some kind of special skill that was unique to them or were tailored to suit a specific role. For example, Rydia in FF4 had the ability to use magic and summon monsters as well as being handicapped by low HP and bad attacking ability. The only character that was close to being tailored like this was Aerith, and we all know what happened to her. Even FF6 gave certain characters special moves like Tools or Blitz. Imagine a team entirely made of Gogos. That’s what your party in FF7 is like.

However, as one plays the game, they may find that magic is completely unnecessary overall. Everyone can get strong attacking ability and magic normally doesn’t do as much damage as just normal attacking. This contributes to the problem that every single battle just seems exactly the same. Why should we use magic (that does low damage, take up MP, and take time to cast) or summons (that take forever to cast) or something if just mindlessly attacking will make the battle go faster and actually be a better strategy? I think it was a combination of wanting to appeal to a wider audience by simplifying the game and the long animations of summons and magic that contributed to the degeneration of the gameplay during battles. Fighting is the most tedious part of the game, and since this is a Final Fantasy (meaning you’ll do it a lot), it makes fighting just seem like some chore to do before getting to the next part of the story.

Not only is there the problem that fighting is tedious, but it is also easy too. This game suffers from the “level and destroy” mentality that plagues many other games. Actually, levleing just seems to be a consequence in this game instead of some type of strategy. Not only that, but enemies don’t seem to really get much harder as time goes on, but you’ll still be fighting tons of them, which means fighting more of the same battle over and over, which means even more tedium. Another problem is that any enemy can be defeated at any level as long as you have a ton of items. Although this was the case with past FF games, there are an even wider variety of items to get in FF7, and you’ll probably end up finishing the game not knowing what all of them do. Also, abusing in items in past FF games took more skill than it does in this game. Before, you had to worry about a character being defeated before you could use the item, but chances are that in this game you will be able to take several hits before having to worry about that.

Other than fighting, something that I was disappointed with was the lack of sidequests. There were only three that involved going to new locations: Defeating Ruby and Emerald Weapon, and Wutai. The ultimate weapons for everyone weren’t even that great to go after since they normally aren’t worth the effort. A lot of times the special weapons could be found by just doing the main game menaing that you didn’t really have to search for them. Finding everyone’s final Limit Break is good, but chances are you don’t use most of the characters, and would only be a waste of time. In order to make up for the lack of sidequests, they included a TON of mini-games. There are some interesting mini-games such as a strategy battle simulator, a snowboarding game, a motorcycle game, and several others. Many of the mini-games are integrated into the gameplay, but can later be replayed at the Gold Saucer. The actual quality of the mini-games is questionable. I myself didn’t really find any of them enjoyable, but other people might. Other than that, they also allow you to breed and race chocobos, which is kind of cool. However, I didn’t like it because of how much time it takes to actually breed a good chocobo. If you’re into that sort of thing, then it should be a nice bonus for you.

I ultimately felt that the game did have a sizeable amount of extra weapons and such, but there isn’t really that much incentive to actually get them. Before in past games, the weapons actually helped you a lot. Now, there’s only two real items that are good, and their both materia (Mimic and Knights of Round). There were only three pure sidequests, and only one of them was actually interesting. Fighting is as tedious as it ever was, and now it’s even boring. Granted boring fights didn’t start wih FF7, but it certainly did its part to make sure they stayed. As much as we want to believe, a handful of mediocre mini-games doesn’t really cover up all of the tedium that this game has. Why is this the case? I think it’s because the gameplay was not the major point of this game, but it was the story. Don’t think that you’ll actually be doing anything for most of the 60+ hours people say this game delivers. The game was long just because of all the dialouge you had to read and all the boring fights you had to do. In addition, this game started a “graphics over gameplay” trend that still plagues the industry today. It’s unfair to place this soley on the shoulders of this game, but no one can say that they didn’t serve a large part in starting the trend.

Difficulty – 6.0
Even with the two Weapons that were added into the American version, the game isn’t that hard at all. Battles take no strategy, and even in the times that they do, the game will tell you so. Even Sephiroth, in his overhyped glory, is as easy as they come. There aren’t really any puzzles or hard dungeons in the game either. Everything is straightforward and explained in detail. Any character can get any ability. The only real difficulty comes from fighting the hidden weapons and navigating in an area. The only reason I gave it above 5 was because of the ridiculous difficulty of the hidden weapons.

Replayable – 6.5
The game has at least one guaranteed play-through after beating the game because it’ll clear up a lot of the stuff that was hard to understand the first time through. After that, though, there isn’t really that much to go back for. Unless you really, REALLY, like the story of this game, you can just put this on your list of beaten games and move on. Didn’t expect me to say that about the “greatest game ever” eh? Well, I’ve got news for you, it’s not the greatest game ever made. There is no such thing as “the greatest game ever.” Final Fantasy 7 was just an average game with a interesting yet flawed story. Play it once to beat it, then one more time to better understand everything, and maybe once more to understand Advent Children, then let it go.

Katamari introspective:

Ahh Katamari, I love you so much. Your wacky story lines, colorful graphics and crisp J-pop music – it’s all so wonderfully Japanese and so childish that no one can help but love it. But wait, does Katamari hold a darker, more grown up secret? Does the game involving a prince and his father bonding hold more of a social commentary they we all thought? Is it not just a game about replacing the stars? No, no it’s something much more sinister.

The game itself revolves around a Prince and his larger than life father. Nothing, in truth, could be better than that… that is, until reality’s ugly head encroaches upon the Japanese fantasy world. The father? A drunk. The mother? Nowhere to be seen and where does that leave the little Prince? Desperately seeking the approval of his alcoholic father. Our story starts out with the King out with a few of his buddies, and after slinging back a few cold ones, the gigantic monarch decides it’s time to head home. While drunk, flying though the cosmos, the King hits and knocks out every star in the sky, including the moon (not a star, shhh). The next day he charges his only son with a quest to restore the heavens to their former glory; the son is more than happy to do this, thinking that maybe his father will notice him or even praise him for doing a good job.

Each mission is centered around the prince using his Katamari to pick up stray objects that will later be flung into space and set ablaze in an attempt to re-create the stars. I’ll get into the meaning of this later, but for now let’s stick to the Prince’s faulty family. After you complete a goal you must present the Katamari to the king so that he may toss it skywards, being that you are too tiny to do so yourself. Despite this being a simple matter, the king always feels the need to butt his own opinion into everything he does or sees. Depending on the size of the Katamari the King will give you different levels of “praise”. If you miss the goal or just hardly make it the king will mock you, and rightly so. If you beat the goal by 10%-20% he will simply state “Ours would have been much bigger.” If you do really well he will say something along the lines of “Well I suppose this is all I can expect from one as small as you,” and even if you double the goal and he is impressed, he will then just fling it into the sky and set it on fire with little to no remorse. And once again, the mother is nowhere in sight. That can’t be good for a kid’s self-esteem.

As I said before, you use a Katamari or giant sticky ball to pick up everything that will fit. Now think about this – the game is about a prince trying to earn his father’s respect by collecting trinkets. In the beginning of the game, much as in real life, you start out collecting little things; cards, gum, and toys. As you progress you work your way up to bigger things like cars, houses and people. Think of it: you work so hard to collect these things and then present them as a gift to your father and he mocks their worth and then sets them on fire in front of you. By the end of the game you have collected enough stuff to rebuild the sky and the King stands up and says “Yes, the stars are back, and now you may thank your king”… not even a whisper of gratitude to his son…

Resident Evil 4
PS2

Presentation: (Resident Evil, more like Resident Badass)

Ok, let me start by saying that this is not a traditional Resident Evil game. First, the camera is placed behind your right shoulder for most of the game. Second, there are very few puzzles and running to find weird keys. Third, there are NO zombies in this game, not one. There are, however, parasitically controlled humans who act a whole lot like zombies, but they aren’t zombies and I’m not going to argue the point because I will win and you will cry. Now I can hear some of you die hard Resident Evil complaining that “this isn’t a TRUE Resident Evil game” and that “they’ve ruined a classic!”, and let me just tell you SHUT THE HELL UP! This game is great and I hope they never go back to the old Resident Evil style games because this new incarnation kicks that much ass.

Alright, now let’s get into the game; you play as Leon Kennedy, the guy from RE2. Leon is now employed as an agent for a government agency that protects the United States President and his family (sounds like the secret service to me but they never call it that so whatever). Before he starts his new job the Presidents daughter is kidnapped by unknown people who have yet to name any demands. The President called on you to go and rescue Ashley from whoever took her and bring her back safe and sound. The game starts with you going to a small European town in what looks to be in Spain (once again it’s never called Spain you just got to guess.). I can’t really get much into the story since I don’t want to ruin anything for you, but let’s just say “It’s a goodun”

Graphics (This is Ps2? Get the fuck out of here.)

Whoa, dude… I mean… Jesus… this is damn good. For a system that is nearly 6 years old this baby can pump out some visuals let me tell you. Everything in this game is done in a very spooky, almost medieval, style. It’s all very Frankensteinesque, what with the villagers with the torches and pitchforks. All the building also has that, build by hand, medieval, kind of look. It’s something new for the Resident Evil series but it works well. Personally I’ve always been a fan of the medieval meets the 21st century style, blending the Tec of now with the style of the past so this really appeals to me.

Graphically this game is top notch, better then I thought the PS2 was capable of for sure. The landscape is done very well in that it all looks like I would imagine a European town to look like if I’ve ever been there. Buildings also have a nice level of detail that fits into the landscape in a very natural way. Character models all look great, especially the main characters like Leon and Ashley. The villagers all look very 1820’s with their cool old style hats and petty coats and such… very 1820’s until they turn that pitchfork on you. Since they villagers aren’t zombies we miss out on cool bloody mangled heaps of flesh shambling around trying to bite your kneecaps off, but these villagers still look very grizzled and just plain mean.

Bosses in particular look great, as they should. There have been a few times where a boss has popped out or changed forms and I literally jumped off my couch and screamed “OHH EWWWW!! Look at that shit!” The bosses also tend to have this awesome sense of scale, since most of them are so large, that you almost wonder if shooting them will even work. Other bosses are just so disgusting that you want to kill them faster just so you don’t have to look at them. Very few games have ever been able to pull of the “ICK” factor so well. It almost reminds me of that movie The Thing, with all the wacky organic freak monsters, if you’ve seen the movie you know what I’m talking about.

This game is not just graphically appalling but it also holds a lot of little things that just make everything real. Flies buzz around dead people, maggots crawl in old food; blood will drip off people impaled to a wall and form a pool of blood. Torches mounted on the wall have little bits off wood in them that you can knock out and will continue to burn for a few second. There are even spiders that you can step on if you want. Fancy stuff if you ask me.

Sound (Other then the voice acting its pretty good)

Once again, we have another Resident Evil with not so good voice acting. While the voice acting in this game is way better then any other Resident Evil game it’s still holding back the whole sound department. Everything else sounds pretty much like I’d want it to. Music is probable the high point of this games sound, very spooky. No real surprise here to be honest, I don’t know maybe I’m too picky but when a game looks this good I kind of want it to sound just as good, you know? Whatever, I’m done here… NEXT!

Gameplay (Awkward at first, then great.)

When I first picked this game up I found it very hard to control, I don’t know why, but I was having problems walking strait. It must be that the behind the shoulder camera thing is a little disorientating at first, but once I got used to it I was busting caps directly into peoples faces. The other problem I had was switching weapons; I kept pulling out the knife (L1) when I wanted to raise the pistol (R1).

The game also took out a lot of the “walk around the wall and hit the check button over and over to find stuff” problems the other Resident Evil games had since this time around you getting a little pop up message at the bottom of the screen to tell you when you can pickup/check/open/use something. Inventory setup is pretty much the same as the other RE games other then this time you can get bigger suitcases to hold more stuff in.

The whole weapons system has been revamped as well. No more looking for a stock on the ground for your TMP, now you shop at a one stop black arms dealer. The arms dealer can sell you anything from new guns to items to upgrades for your current guns; oddly enough he doesn’t carry ammo unless you sold him some before. Upgrades can be done on reload time, magazine capacity, firing rate, and fire power. For the most part money is found on the ground after you kill bad guys or inside of boxes that you bust open with your knife, but you can also make some extra scratch by selling treasure items such as gold rings and jewels. Some items can be upgraded to fetch a higher price by adding a particular type of jewel or stone to it.

Remember how in all the other Resident Evil games you just kind of shot in the general direction of the enemy you wanted to kill? Well not anymore, in this game you can aim! Aiming at bad guys is done by first raising your weapon (R1) then using the left thumb stick to move the laser sight around and then by pulling the trigger (X) to fire. The villagers have a pretty good shot reaction system where if you shoot someone in the leg they’ll fall to their knees and if you shoot someone in the arm they’ll drop whatever weapon they have. Good stuff, good stuff indeed.

Oh, and one last thing, during cut scenes; don’t put down your controller. There are some cut scenes where you have you have to hit buttons to avoid being killed, much like Shenmue for Dreamcast.

Lasting Appeal (play it once? Nah play it 5 times!)

The first time you play this game it’ll probably take you between 12 and 22 hours to complete, which isn’t a bad length for this type of game and that’s if you don’t keep dieing or go looking for every last item. But you’ll want to play it again so you can unlock new weapons such as the Tommy gun and infinite ammo rocket launcher. Also the this game offers mercenary missions to play after you beat the game the first time, and the PS2 version offers an exclusive Ada mission that can take up to 6 more hours to beat which pumps this game up to a good 30 to 50 hours! Wow that’s a lot of play for $50.

Overall (Buy it, shoot stuff, be happy)

If you like Resident Evil you should pick this up without question. This is the definitive Resident Evil. It may be 75% new game play but it’s 100% awesome. People who have never played a Resident Evil, well I don’t know about you… do you like to shoot things? Do you like zombie-like action? Do you like giant-ass monsters? If you answered yes to any of these questions then you should play this game. If you answered no, well, then I’m afraid to say this but I probably hate you.

Soul Calibur III
PS2

Presentation: (Like Soul Calibur II, only bigger and better)

Everybody’s favorite weapon based fighter is back, yea buddy you know what I’m talking about; Soul Calibur. For those that don’t know, Soul Calibur is a weapons based fighting game. Now what this means is that the players don’t just punch and kick their way to victory but they also use knives swords shields and whips to beat the living tar out of each other . Each character has a weapon type that is unique to that person, and since there are a lot of selectable fighters this makes for tons of cool fights. Speaking of lots of fighters, there are over 18 characters to pick from. This includes all the fighters from the Soul Calibur II, well except the 1 special guy that each platform had (Sorry no Spawn or Link) plus 3 brand new ones. BUT WAIT! There’s more, on top of the 18 fighters included in the game there is a character creation mode *audible gasp*. In the character creation mode you have access to well over 300 different items to trick out your l337 fighter, this includes new weapons and fighting styles.

Graphics (Not to shabby)

Graphics are pretty good in most respects but compared to Soul Calibur II on Xbox they aren’t great, but on the plus side Soul Calibur III is for PS2 exclusively so I really have no right to complain but I will anyway. Some of the moving backgrounds look kind of shitty with a lot of jaggies and poorly textured landscapes, even some of the flooring in a few of the stages look like they could have been done a little better. I guess those are the only real complaints that I have.

Characters all look great, although a bit unrealistic… you know… like Dead or Alive unrealistic, in the chest area. Alright, I’ll spell it out for you; the boobs in the game are so large on a few of the female fighters that it’s almost comical. Ivy, in particular, has monster giant gonzo boobs. These things are so large that they bounce around with such force that it looks like they would rip off of her chest and crack the cement when they hit the ground, if this was real life that is. Other then that the players all look awesome, flowing hair and clothes, good facial expressions, awesome looking armor and fighting garb.

Arenas look good enough other then the aforementioned texture problems. Most of the levels are smallish arenas that always have some kind of fall off point that allows for ring outs. Most levels are static locations like churches or dungeons, but other are moving locations such as a raft floating down a river or giant rock trapped in a magma flow. Levels are all pretty varied with a bunch of cool places to go to, but there are a few repetitive levels that seem like other levels only with modest changes.

Sound (Capcomish)

The sound… alright see the thing about the sound is that it can only be explained by saying that it fits so well with the way Capcom does things. See, Capcom always makes these awesome games that all have great graphics, game play, and even a modicum of originality. The other thing Capcom always does is that they always put great music and great sound effects into these awesome games. Notice how I left out voice acting, Capcom ALWAYS fucks up the voice acting, it’s the one thing that is never on par with anything else in the game. It’s not even like the voice acting is bad, it’s just not as good as every other aspect of the game. Does this hold true for Soul Calibur III? You bet you bippie it does.

Soul Calibur III has great music, very combat friendly medieval music. Soul Calibur III also has great sound effects; the weapons all clang together very nicely and the thuds all sound great. Soul Calibur III does not, however, have great voice acting… and that’s sad to me. The voice acting in Soul Calibur III seems like they had the voice actors read the words one at a time, and then later spliced the words together to make the script. The only good thing is that you can change over to the Japanese voice track and avoid any of problems that the American voices suffer from.

Gameplay (CLANG! SWIPE! BLOCK! FUN!)

Alright as for game modes, you got your standard arcade mode which is just like it sounds. Pick a player and play to the end, each time you beat it you earn some kind of unlockable such as a new fighter or new items for the characters creation mode. Also each time you beat the game you earn an arbitrary amount of gold that can be used to buy new weapons for either the character creation mode or for the arcade mode. Each new weapon you unlock can be used to play in versus mode or in the arcade mode, now see the cool thing about the new weapons is that not only do they just look cool but they also add some kind of combat bonus. Combat bonuses can be anything from adding extra damage or defense to adding cool effects to your player. Effects can be good or bad; adding health slowly or slowing draining health are decent examples of the goodness or badness.

Then you have a new mode that kind of play like a real time strategy game but with the fights done in the Soul Calibur III fight engine. Each quest is about a half hour and at the end of each quest you earn some money, maybe a few items to improve your growing army. Your army starts out with your custom player and some other guy training, but will later grow up to be a large force of 10 or 20 people. Each person in the army gains experience for each battle and can then level up to make them stronger and faster and such. There is also a pretty entertaining story in this mode but it’s nothing worth getting into here. At the end of the quest you have a chance to go shopping and buy new stuff for your units, you also have a chance to change the appearance of the unit using the same customization screen that you used to create your player.

Combat in Soul Calibur III is not done in a street fighter style, with the strong medium and weak attacks, but instead in its own fighting style. Fighting in Soul Calibur III is done in a 3d realm in which you can move backwards forwards and side to side. To compensate for the 3d fighting Soul Calibur III had to have different types off attacks to keep people from simply side stepping each time you attack. Ok so in Soul Calibur III you got your vertical attack which is good when the person is dead in front of you, then you have your vertical attacks with is good when the person is to the side, then you also have kicks which can be either vertical or horizontal. You also have high, middle and low attacks for attacking people in the face, the chest and the legs respectively. You also have block, known a guard in Soul Calibur III, blocking is done by pushing block and up down or nothing to block your face legs and body. Oh and throws, there’s throws too.

Now the combat system may seem a little bit hard, and it is, but it’s also a whole lot of fun. Fights often end up looking like a carefully choreographed movie, especially the throws. Since a lot of the fighting is based on realistic fighting styles you almost feel like your some kind of crazy black belt ready to beat down a rival. God how I love the fights in this game.

Now on to something that most fighting games keep to a minimum, the story. Wait wait wait wait, a fighting game with a story? Yea that’s right; Soul Calibur III has a story. Not just one story mind you, but each fighter has their own story that intermingles with the other fighters stories to make one large story. I’m not going to get into the story for each player because I don’t want to be writing this for the next 23 hours, but let me just say that the stories are all pretty good, nothing super RPGish, but still good.

Lasting Appeal (Must unlock more stuff!)

Soul Calibur III is probably one of the longest fighting games ever, there are so many things that you just have to unlock. First you got to unlock all the players, and then you got to try and beat the arcade mode with everyone so you know if there are any special players. Then I’m sure you’ll want to unlock all the items so you can make your own badass fighter right? But then why stop at one custom fighter when you can make 3 or 4? Then there’s multiplayer! OH then you have to beat that new mode, and that’s a whole game in and of its self. Long story short, you’ll be playing this for a long time coming.

Overall (I tell you what; I enjoy it.)

This is one of those games, you know, those games that you can always pick up and play, and every time you do you have fun. Over all this is a very long game with tons of stuff to unlock and tons of good modes to keep you occupied until the next great game takes over.