Final Fantasy VI (1994) by Square

I fondly remember the days of playing this game in my parents house as a 9-year old, awestruck by just how good video games can be. I played it for hours upon its release and it ignited a love for RPGs that lasts to this day. I still go back every once in a while to replay the game, and I'm happy to see that it's been ported to Steam so I don't have to break out the old Nintendo DS or -- gasp! -- my grandfatherly SNES that still sits in my closet next to a shoebox on my most cherished titles from the '90s.

Most reviewers gripe about the graphics "update", and while I generally do prefer the original sprites (sprites tend to age better than any polygonal graphics), I don't find the graphical change to be much worse. It's different, sure, but really not worse in any objective way. I can understand how the greybeards would be miffed at a change to their beloved classic games, but it really didn't bother me. And as a nearly day-one played of the original title in 1994, I'm about as old school as they come.

I absolutely adore Final Fantasy VII, but I did knock some points off for how bad the port from the PS1 to Steam was, and I'm happy to say that's not much of a problem here. This one, while it's not fantastic, seems to work fine. You're going to lack some high resolution options here, but given how badly they were implemented in Final Fantasy VII with its disastrously upscaled backgrounds, I'd say that's not too much of a problem. This isn't an HD remaster, it's just a port of the original game, which was designed for tube TVs rather than PC screens. As such, this is a perfect game to play windowed while you've got some other stuff going on in the background.

While the graphics have aged incredibly well, the story and writing, however, have not. When this game released it helped to push the bar of good character writing and narrative. Unfortunately that bar has long been pressed onward and well past where Final Fantasy VI left it. While the characters are still incredibly charming and thoughtfully written, and the plot has some decent surprises in store for you, the writing in general lacks a lot of the depth that we can find in modern day games.

That's no reason not to play Final Fantasy VI, though. The combat system is still fun, with a grand cast of party members each featuring their own special abilities carrying combat through the majority of the game. Using such a colorful cast of characters is a joy, and the game really takes pains to ensure that they're all unique and introduces them in a manner in which none of them are just a face in the crowd. You genuinely care about them all and want to see them succeed. You'll find yourself cheering when one of them lands a critical or pulls you out of a tough situation. The game isn't overly challenging unless you've got no idea what you're doing, though.

The Esper system is good, but lacks a little bit compared to the job system and the later Materia system, which is probably my favorite in the series outside of Final Fantasy Tactics' jobs and abilities system.

Seriously, Squeenix, can we get a PC port for Final Fantasy Tactics? Please?

It'd be a crime not to mention Nobuo Uematsu's unbelievably amazing score, which is among the best in the Final Fantasy series and certainly among the best scores in all of video game history. It's spellbinding, utterly engrossing. To this day I can't hear a track from it that doesn't take me back to sitting on my parents' carpet, staring up at the 20" tube TV, playing the best game I had ever played up to that point of my life; one that would stick with me more than 20 years later and inspire me to write a review about this newfangled Steam version. And that's why I love this game so much. It's a charming, emotionally impactful roller coaster ride to a simpler time.

Play it and maybe it'll be the same for you.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Playtime: 108 hours

Tyranny (2016) by Obsidian Entertainment

This title is no graphical powerhouse, but the environmental design is very good. There's a clear emphasis on the late bronze age here a la The Iliad, and it's really wonderful. Though I actually like the late middle ages as a setting I recognize that it's beginning to become tiresome to constantly set fantasy in that time period. As a classical history major myself I found the influence of Hellenistic culture in Tyranny to be more refreshing than even I'd have thought before getting into it. Merchants sell olives, the Disfavored fight in a phalanx, etc. It's surprisingly refreshing not to have knights riding around on horses, swearing fealty to dukes, while everyone attends the coronation of the boy king. Instead we're dealing with emperors, heavily armored infantry spearmen and peltasts. It's a welcome change in setting and it makes me wonder why more fantasy isn't set in this type of era.

A great feature of Tyranny is how it smoothly introduces its lore. It begins with "Conquest", a choose-your-own-adventure prologue where you flesh out your player character's backstory in much detail. It affects a whole lot of atmosphere in the game, including how NPCs refer to you, dialogue options, plot options, and even active combat abilities your character has available to them. Conquest is good not so much because of what it affects in the game because of how it smoothly introduces the player to the world's lore. Fantasy games featuring deep worldbuilding are often prone to getting bogged down with too much exposition in the first few hours. The first Mass Effect is guilty of this when it strands you on the Citadel for hours after Eden Prime without much to do but speak to NPCs and read codex entries to learn its lore. Tyranny is able to get around that because you've already been introduced to major past events and characters in the Conquest prologue without having realized it as you made choice after choice. It's really a brilliant way to do things, and it made jumping into the game smooth. There is still some exposition to be had when speaking with squadmates but it's very relaxed compared to many other titles with similarly well-designed lore.

The biggest drawback I noticed with the Conquest prologue is that it can sometimes create jarring, disjointed dialogue in-game. I've had people meet me and immediately praise me for having made a decision beneficial to them early in Conquest, only to have them passionately insult me in the very next window of dialogue for making a later decision in Conquest that was damaging to them. I understand the difficulty in blending so many prologue decisions into the campaign, but this happened too frequently and it was incredibly immersion breaking.

Another drawback is the voice acting, which is pretty bad in general save for certain performances such as Verse and Eb. The Voices of Nerat is particularly awful -- He sounds more like a Twitch streamer reading Nerat's dialogue than a professional voice actor. Barik is nearly as bad; his delivery is universally wooden and awkward. He sounds almost like a teenager trying to deepen his voice to sound more mature. I'd have been fine with no voice acting whatsoever.

Tyranny's combat is pretty standard cRPG fare. I tolerated it for the first portion of the game only to try and dive into the narrative, but it quickly grew boring and served only as something I had to reluctantly push through to try and see more of the story. Not too far into the game I found myself sloppily pushing through most engagements just to get them over with. On the plus side are the spells used in combat. They're the prettiest thing about this game: They're viscerally impactful and feature gorgeous particle effects. Combat is not very good, but it's also not why people are going to play Tyranny, so I don't weight it as much as the writing in this review.

In classic Obsidian fashion, this game lives and dies upon its writing. And this, to me, is where the game fails.

I found too many of the characters to be too gimmicky and, at worst, downright cheesy and contrived specifically to be as unique as possible. It's always good to have interesting, unique characters, but you've got to draw the line somewhere before things start getting ridiculous. There also needs to be a touchstone of relatable characters so that the contrast between them and the more outrageous characters exists. In addition to this, some characters just struck me as "off". For example, The Voices of Nerat is a mage who absorbs the minds of other mages he's conquered. He basically lives with a thousand other minds in his head and a world's worth of knowledge and intelligence. I'd assume a character like this would be wise, quiet, always plotting, with just a subtle touch of insanity peering through every once in a while. Instead he's written as more of a Joker-esque madman, cackling and blathering on about nonsense when he's not hurling juvenile insults at Graven Ashe for no real reason. It's just too much. It seems as if the writers were trying too hard to make his persona notable when subtlety would have served far better. A lot of the writing warrants exactly that criticism: It just seems to be trying too hard, as if Obsidian is aware of its reputation for sterling writing and is struggling to live up to it.

I also found the dialogue to be sub par. It has a tendency to sound unnaturally casual or out of place. The Disfavored are supposed to be unmatched in their discipline, so why do they all refer to their commander by his first name rather than his rank? And Graven Ashe is centuries old but talks in colloquialisms. Good dialogue writing is about getting the little things right. Too many of them are wrong in Tyranny.

It's not all bad, though. The writing is at its best in its allowance for roleplaying. This is a game that will have you staring at dialogue screens for 10 minutes, tempted to alt+tab into your browser to google results of a decision because you're honestly stumped as to which choice is the least of a half-dozen evils. I found myself struggling to roleplay not because it was bad, but because I was constantly tested by the complexity of the pickles it presents, constantly weighing the effects of each choice and the repercussions against each party involved. Balancing the favor of the larger forces at play (ie. your party members, the Disfavored legions, the Scarlet Chorus horde, and the Archons who control all of the above, and more) is the core of this game. And it's what it does best.

I'm not an old school cRPG fan but I have been playing RPGs for nearly 30 years. Even despite that background I only made it about 15 hours in to Tyranny before I simply lost the desire to keep playing. Considering that, I can't recommend this game to the typical RPG fan looking to try out a new title.

Tyranny is a decent game... Depending on what you're looking for. It aims squarely and unapologetically at the cRPG fanbase and provides some solid roleplaying but features quite a few damning flaws. If you're a hardcore cRPG fan and willing to overlook some rough edges, then you'll probably like Tyranny. However if you're just an RPG fan looking for a new game to play, I'd probably pass on this one. It's too uneven an experience with too many flaws that add up to damage the overall experience.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 14 hours

Mark of the Ninja (2012) by Klei Entertainment

I'm a huge stealth fan and I heard people championing Mark of the Ninja as an amazing stealth experience from pretty much release day onward. I played the crap out of it originally on the Xbox 360 before I fully converted to a PC gamer, after which I purchased it on Steam and have played through it a few times here. I just bought Invisible, Inc. tonight, which is made by the same developer, Klei, and it made me realize I should get off my butt and write this gushing review about what an awesome damned game Mark of the Ninja is. I should have written this review years ago, but hey, I'm lazy. So here it is now.

The put it simply: Mark of the Ninja is one of the best pure stealth games ever made. Yes, ever. It's up there with the classics of the genre like Thief, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, Tenchu, etc. It's that good. If you enjoy the stealth genre and you for some reason have yet to play this game, buy it this instant. It's easily worth full price. Don't even read the rest of my review, just thumb it up for knocking some sense into you, buy Mark of the Ninja, install it, and play it all night until you're surely screwed for class/work/whatever you have to wake up for tomorrow morning. You can thank me later.

If you need some more convincing, then feel free to read on.

Immediately noticeable are the beautiful, comic book-esque visuals and the amazing work from the animation team. The environments are vibrant, colorful, and full of atmosphere. There's not a bad one in the game. And the character models are what Klei has come to be known for: Cartoony, charming, but with a gritty edge to them. The art design in general is utterly fantastic. Seriously, I'd hang a print of some of the backgrounds in this game on my living room wall as art. And the cutscenes are beautifully animated as well. They wouldn't be out of place in any feature animated film of years past. Simply put: It's a gorgeous game. It does a lot without using many resources; it should run very well on most machines.

Another thing worth mentioning is the gameplay role that lighting takes. The art design blends into gameplay on harder difficulties when a background blur and varying directional light shift with where your player character is looking. It functions very well as a gameplay features but also looks really cool. Win-win.

The sound design of this game is another thing that stands out. Ambient sounds are engrossing and carefully crafted, the effects themselves are also phenomenal. Footsteps from running are crisp and sound like the real thing, they're also louder than you'd expect and serve to remind you that you're being a bit too noisy. Everything sounds remarkably crisp and has a solid echo and weight to it. It seems as though the volume levels of your actions have all specifically been altered to sound more jarring than they normally would have, which fits great with a stealth game since it constantly makes you feel like you're making too much noise even when you aren't. It serves to craft your mood as you're playing the game. It's brilliant.

The core stealth gameplay itself is actually remarkably simple. There are few bells and whistles here, which is good considering that the core gameplay is more than robust enough to carry the rest of the game. Level design is superb, enemies are interesting and challenging. You're given enough tools to make you feel superbly bad ass when you pull of something cool, but still vulnerable enough to require quite a bit of skill to get through unscathed.

The replay value of this game is a huge plus. The various challenges and collectibles in each level in addition to the heightened difficulties (which are the best way to play the game in my personal opinion) left me with a feeling similar to what platforming fans must feel when they're repeating the same level of Mario in order to get the perfect score. There are also a number of different costumes you can wear that alter your abilities, there are a number of different tools you can equip to augment your favorite way of getting past guards, etc. There's a lot of modularity (is that a word?) here, and quite a few different ways to play through the levels. There are also some neat developer commentary tracks that are worth a listen as well.

I've never been a platforming fan, but this game is definitely influenced by them. There's maybe 8 hours of gameplay here if you're taking your time, but you can easily triple that with replays. I still jump back into this game from time to time and it not only does it offer significant replay value, but it also stands the test of time very well. The gameplay is so no frills that there's nothing that'll really grow old, and the animated visuals will never go out of date. Hell, Chrono Trigger still looks good, and that game released in, what, 1995? 1996? Sprites, man, how do they work?

Anyway, this is the point when I'd typically bring up some of the drawbacks of a title, but Mark of the Ninja is a game I honestly can't find anything wrong with. It's just that good. I suppose I can see how non-stealth fans might find it slow, maybe? But not really, because there's also some combat involved if you get caught, and it's totally viable to play this game in a more run-and-gun style. It is kind of short, I guess? But the price reflects that.

I don't gush very often and I tend to be a harsh reviewer in general, but this one is a masterpiece in every sense of the word and you're missing out as a stealth fan until you experience it. Buy it gladly and thank Klei on Twitter for making such an awesome video game.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Playtime: 23 hours

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016) by Eidos Montreal

I feel like I should qualify this review by first stating that I'm a massive fanboy of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I recognize that that game has some flaws but the ambiance is second to none, the stealth gameplay is satisfying, and the way the plot drives you forward to its conclusion makes you loath to put it down. It's one of the few games in which I've gotten 100% of its Steam achievements. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is one of the best games of the 2010s in my own humble opinion.

This game just fails to live up to pretty much every level set by the previous game.

The gameplay is returned more or less unchanged from the first game. The only real difference is that Jensen is given several new tools to use, justified by some cheesy in-plot explanation as someone having altered his augmentations while he was comatose after the first game. The problem here is that not enough has changed from the first game. And while that doesn't seem like much of a problem given how much I enjoyed Human Revolution, it's starting to feel quite dated and lacks any further development over the past 5 years.

I'll approach this mostly from a stealth angle since that's how I play the game.

The most glaring issue here is that there's a core problem with the energy system that regulates your use of augments. Jensen has some awesome tools to use to maneuver around the environment undetected, but the problem is how overpowered these tools are. To solve the issue of being an absolute god, the devs chose to reign these in by using the same battery meter from the first, which is replenished by consumables when it gets low. This is a problem simply because you end up playing the game without ever using them, instead choosing to save them for when you really need them. Now that's not a problem by itself, but it is when you realize you're sneaking through entire areas trial-and-error and never actually using the majority of your augmentations. This was a weakness in Human Revolution, and it was greatly disappointing not to see it rectified in this game. There has to be a better way to balance these powers than resorting to consumables. Perhaps a smaller battery meter that recharges more slowly? The battery meter refueled by consumables feels archaic and clumsy in a game that features otherwise interesting stealth puzzles to overcome.

And on top of that, the new augments present aren't actually all that useful. Aside from remote hacking I never used any of them, instead relying on the vanilla mods from Human Revolution. This could have been dealt with by having a new playable character, or a second one like the route Dishonored 2 went. Anything would have been more interesting than the same exact skillset from Human Revolution with the addition of a half-dozen augmentations that aren't even particularly useful. The fact that Jensen is back reeks of the studio's unwillingness to take a risk, or perhaps it was dictated to them by their publisher that coverboy Adam Jensen needed to be present in the game. I suppose we'll never know. But a new protagonist or at least some kind of change to keep things fresh would have added a lot more flavor to the now-stale gameplay present here.

Ambiance was something that Human Revolution did amazingly well. There were complaints about the gold filter but I really thought it added to the game's ambiance and I never had a problem with it. On top of that, the Michael McCann's absolutely mind-blowing score changed the entire feel of the game and was arguably the single best part of it. Mankind Divided instead goes for a more realistic feel, and the score, while at times comes close to the high bar set in Human Revolution, is far more inconsistent and settles for more subtle, less noticeable score. I didn't feel nearly as blown away by the sense that I was in a different world in Mankind Divided that I did when I played through Human Revolution, and for me that was a real disappointment.

Don't get me wrong; the world in Mankind Divided is good. Very good, in fact. The environmental design and level design is the only aspect of this game aside from its graphical prowess that is clearly better than Human Revolution. But I really missed the blatant, heavy-handedness of Human Revolution's ambiance in this title. In going for more realism they lost some of the weight of Human Revolution's atmosphere. It's now less cyberpunk-comic-book, more hard-science-fiction-thriller. I suppose it depends on what you prefer, but I was disappointed. I'm typically more a fan of subtlety, but I loved the chronically overdone atmosphere that Human Revolution featured.

Lastly, and perhaps most glaringly: The plotting of this game is a cruel joke. It starts off with a bang then slows to a crawl, with hours of exposition and environmental narrative introducing plot points that are barely touched upon later, if even ever mentioned again at all. There are several interesting threads kicked along only to be left completely unresolved while we instead focus on investigating a terrorist bombing. Jensen's mods, the group he's working for, etc. are all left unresolved in an egregious example of sequel baiting. Finishing this game is wholly unsatisfying; I was left completely undriven by the frankly boring plot, and although the level design is great, the dated gameplay itself does nowhere near enough to carry the game on its own. As you can see from my achievements, I got right up to the end and never even finished the game. The side quests were far, far more compelling than the main plot. And once I was done with them I felt like I was grinding out the rest of the game until I decided just to stop and move on to something I'd actually enjoy.

All of these flaws might be passable if only to experience what this game does well: Interesting, well crafted environments, excellent level design, great side quest writing, solid voice acting. But this game, unfortunately, runs like absolute garbage.

I have zero issues running most games in 1440p at 60 fps, however this title barely broke 40 fps in most places with low to medium settings. Turning off SLI actually improved my framerate by 5 fps or so. Not a great sign. Even after turning off SLI and running it on my 1080p monitor I still experienced frame drops to around 50 fps on medium settings. This is simply unacceptable, and had I known the majority of the game ran like this then I'd have refunded it within 2 hours. But, interestingly enough, the entire first area runs quite well and it's only once you get to Prague that the problems start.

Interesting how games are shipping with more polished early areas ever since Valve adopted its refund policy. Quite interesting. And infuriating.

There are also several graphical and physics bugs present, and the game didn't even ship with DX12 (though it was later patched in and is now active). This is a title that clearly needed a few more months of polish, but with Square Enix's dumpster-tier publisher reputation it's not a surprise that it was forced out early. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if this is actually half of the game and the developers at Eidos actually had a full, satisfying plot written but were told to cut it in half so Square Enix could double their profits with two releases rather than one. This is purely speculation, but I surely won't be purchasing Mankind Divided's inevitable sequel until it's well below a $30 price tag. Fool me once...

This is a bad port and a disappointing game. Even as a fervent Human Revolution fanboy I can't recommend purchasing this title at full price. Wait until it gets under $30 and take a shot at it. Just make sure you go in with tempered expectations.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 54 hours