STEINS;GATE (2009) by 5pb and Nitroplus

I'm not sure I've ever played a game as poorly paced as STEINS;GATE. Maybe I just don't like visual novels -- The only one I've ever played before is Doki Doki Literature Club. So that could definitely be the case.

But man this game is a drag.

All of the hearsay and reviews have informed me that the narrative gets great around the 4th chapter, but at this point I'm not sure I can make it that long. The sheer amount of exposition being thrown at me seems to dominate somewhere around 75-80% of all the text boxes, and that's further slowed down by a "tip" feature (which is basically just a codex) that inexplicably does not allow you to simply click the popup to relocate directly to the tips page, but makes you cycle through the entire damn menu to see the new entry that popped up. So whenever I want to find out what something is, I have to leave the already-boring-me-to-tears game to navigate through a clunky, poorly designed menu. Ugh.

The attempts at humor in this game that I assume many of its fans find quirky and charming is completely lost on me. The characters haven't really been given any depth yet, leaving not much to sustain my curiosity so far. The music is incredibly generic and fails to set any sort of interesting tone. And there has been literally no gameplay aside from a few dialogue choices via e-mail so far. I'd be able to deal with all of this if I were a couple of hours into the game, but I'm nearing 6 hours at this point and I'm not foreseeing any drastic changes in the near future. There are bits and pieces of the narrative that I find intriguing, but they're too few and far between to keep me wading through heaps of the main character's dry, expository inner thoughts, or his fat creepy friend's weird crushes, or his almost literally retarded "little sister" friend's ADD addled musings. This game is about as exciting as a meal of cardboard so far.

Overall though, the main reason I'm confident I can recommend against this game is because it's a downright awful port, which I haven't seen mentioned in many reviews. The resolution tops out at 1080p, the menus are obviously not optimized for a mouse and keyboard and the mouse and keyboard controls are wonky to begin with (plus there's a delay in switching between the two), it doesn't alt tab well, etc. All the hallmarks of something that was poorly ported from a console to PC are here. I've had a couple of crashes as well which have forced me back a ways thanks to the game's archaic save function.

I'm going to try and keep playing but figured I'd post my thoughts so far in case I decide to give up on this game. I'll update this review if I play more and change my thoughts. If they're all like this then perhaps visual novels just aren't for me.

Edit: Just went back after alt+tabbing to write this review and the game froze, causing me to lose 30 mins or so of gameplay. I'm done, just going to watch the anime instead.

⭐

Playtime: 6 hours

Final Fantasy XII (2006) by Square Enix

I first played Final Fantasy XII upon its release in 2006. I was a college senior at the time, too preoccupied with my longtime girlfriend and my brand new (and godawful) full-time job to really focus on video games. As a longtime Final Fantasy fan since childhood (I had first played Final Fantasy on the NES with my father as a child), I expected to love the story but was enthusiastically unenthused by what I'd seen of the gameplay demos. No turn-based combat? Pshaw! Nonsense! I ended up being entertained by the interesting gambit system and disappointed by the dry story and monotonous pacing. I never finished Final Fantasy XII. Life got in the way and I wasn't driven towards the checkered flag.

Enter 2018. Square-soft -- sorry, Square-ENIX -- has released a remastered, HD version of Final Fantasy XII. I'm now in my mid-30s, comfortable in my career and my life and greatly enjoying gaming again. I figure I'll give XII another shot.

Probably the most important thing every fan of the original game wants to know: The remastered graphics are pretty fantastic. This isn't just a cheap, shoddy port like Steam's Final Fantasy VII. The team has upped the resolution on all of the environmental textures, and the settings look great. The art has an oil painting feel that comes from upscaling the resolution and blurring the lines just enough. As a result: aside from a few overly square corners, the game looks like it could have passably been released this year. The animations are passable but the models are beautiful. If you loved Final Fantasy XII on PS2, you'll love it on Steam.

I am such a fan of good music in games, and I'd be a fool not to mention XII's brilliant score right up front as a huge pro. I had forgotten how beautiful it is. It's so wonderful, that it'll make you blink twice when I tell you it's not by Nobuo Uematsu. Wait, what!? That's right, Uematsu sat this one out and ceded his nearly 20-year stranglehold on the reigns of the Final Fantasy series' scores to Hitoshi Sakimoto. And boy does Sakimoto absolute slay it. Sakimoto turns in -- no hyperbole -- a veritable John Williams effort. This is one of the best scores I've ever heard in a game, up there with Amon Tobin's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory or Jesper Kyd's Assassin's Creed II. It's been fully reorchestrated and remastered specifically for The Zodiac Age, and it's even better than the PS2 OST from 2006. The track Eruyt Village is a particular standout.

The combat system is good. I remember hearing that it was real-time back before the game released in some preview coverage and being disappointed that they were moving away from Active Time Battle, but it works. No JRPG since has managed to succeed with the fast-paced, exciting system that Final Fantasy XII tries for. Ironically, the game that most closely accomplishes this is Dragon Age: Origins; BioWare's last private hurrah from 2009 prior to being staked through the heart by EA. If you were a huge fan Dragon Age: Origins' combat system and feel you can put up with some JRPG tropes, you'll appreciate this game. I always preferred Origins for its story, though, so the combat system of Final Fantasy XII was not quite enough to keep me playing the game by itself.

The licensing board, differing from our North American release in 2006, is the biggest argument to try this if you didn't like the original release. It's a better twist on the original, open board. However, that brings me to another huge criticism: You're forced to choose your job for each character almost immediately, without knowing what the pros and cons are between them, and without being able to change, ever. It's simply asinine that the designers didn't have some sort of respec system in this game. It's impossible to choose the correct job combinations (you're later able to choose a second job for each character to compliment their first, which is, of course, not even hinted at when you first choose the job for each character) led me to spending literally 4 hours researching online before I even played through my first hour of the game. It's one of the worst design choices I've seen in a game.

After playing through a few hours what I was most surprised about my first playthrough of the game back in 2006 was just how fantastical the environments in this game are. Final Fantasy XII is one of the best games in the series at putting a fantasy twist on medieval settings. The only other title that really comes close to making you feel like you're in an oddly realistic, yet foreign world is Final Fantasy VII (or perhaps Final Fantasy XIII, but that game has a ton of issues aside from its setting, and its Steam port is awful, so I wouldn't recommend it). XII has cities reminiscent of the Dwarven thaigs from Dragon Age, but with humans living in them, it's got long-abandoned mechanical derricks pumping oil from the ground, and entire armies floating around in zeppelins. It has Zeal from Chrono Trigger, powered by supercharged magicite from Final Fantasy VII, populated by Yang Fang Leidens from Final Fantasy IV. While nobody will mistake this for a world designed by Mervyn Peake (nothing is quite like Gormenghast, anyway), it stretches the imagination in the right ways and depicts some of the better non-epic fantasy worlds that have been shown in video games. So if that sort of thing floats your boat, you might find this game worth playing.

My biggest criticism of the game, and the reason I can't recommend it to anybody, is that the pacing is downright awful. Between narrative cutscenes you're going to travel through between 1-3 different locations, each with 5-8 different maps, filled with maybe 3-5 different types of respawning enemies each. These areas, while sometimes inspired in their design, are almost universally way too large, or cramped and repetitive, and the combat in these areas consists of repeatedly killing loads of generic bad guys you have to hack through dozens of times before you get to any dialogue or story once again. There are literally hours of this gameplay with no dialogue. And the story isn't good enough to carry this.

This game, overall, is a slog.

If you've played Final Fantasy X, think of the feeling you got when you first got to the Calm Lands and start to run across it, only to hit random battle after random battle, over and over. If you liked that, then you'll probably like Final Fantasy XII. If you, like me, hated it, then stay far, far away from this game. Because it's basically just that in every single area.

To me, it is absolutely monotonous and will cause all but the most hardcore of fans to put the controller down around 35 hours into the game. It's a real shame because it starts off so well, paced alright with some good story beats, but falls apart in this boring agony of running into the same generic areas, hacking the same generic enemies to death numerous times around the time you depart for the Dawn Shard.

I started this game enthralled at enjoying what I was never able to finish before, and I'm now trudging through the seemingly endless maps of the Ozmone Plains, nodding my head knowingly, and mumbling to myself: "Yup, this is it. This is why I stopped last time. I remember now." It's a huge disappointment to me -- a rabid fan of Ivalice -- And it left me wanting to go back to Final Fantasy Tactics and devour a game set in such an interesting world that wasn't plagued by such absolutely awful pacing and monotonous gameplay. The first few hours are intriguing, but the pacing gets worse from there. I can only recommend this to the most hardcore of fans, and even then, your time is better spent elsewhere.

For me? I'll replay Dragon Age: Origins instead.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 52 hours