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1. Final Fantasy VII Remake 2. Death Stranding It's kind of crazy to think that these are the only two games I've beaten so far this year, but I guess I've been playing a decent amount of unbeatable games or ones that are online-focused. But I finally beat this game. Got the Platinum trophy, too, which I'm pretty sure is only my second one. It was actually fairly easy if you've already put all the time into it I did. Just tedious. Overall, I kinda compare this game to Final Fantasy XV. There's a great engine and gameplay style being employed, with a big open world that you can take a lot of time to explore. But there's not really enough in the world to make it consistently interesting. The difference for me is FFXV still made the open-world part feel satisfying and rewarding to explore. Death Stranding's world...kinda doesn't. Likes are useless when not for the sake of leveling a location up, so the lost cargo becomes an endeavor of diminishing returns in most cases. The memory chips and the lore is cool, but there's only so many mountain peaks and interesting areas where you'll find something like that to really make it worth your while. And I hate hate hate how cut and paste a lot of the game is. The distribution centers all reuse the same models and animations, with the same cookie-cutter dialogue templates, and it contributes to the "low reward" factor. I also feel like the stealth was only really engaging the first few times. After that it just became tedious. The majority of the boss fights offering little in the way of variance didn't help either. All of this became more painfully obvious when I came back to it after putting it down for a couple months. Before, I saw the shortcomings and was still pretty into connecting all the centers and 100%-ing everything. But it was almost enough to make me give up on the game when I came back. That said, I decided to plow through the story and...I ended up getting hooked again. The story was, surprisingly, pretty tame and coherent compared to the MGS storyline. Stuff that's still overly complex, but actually makes a good amount of sense and is told pretty straight-forward once the info is out there. You do need some of the interviews and reports to put together the whole story, but even without that stuff, the event of the last few chapters actually come together pretty clearly, even if you don't remember every detail from earlier parts. There weren't a lot of twists that you couldn't see coming in some way, but the big one definitely made me drop my jaw. While I feel the story wasn't spliced into the gameplay enough to really make you grow with the characters, the final moments end up being pretty emotional. Death Stranding isn't perfect, and definitely not for everybody. I think what Kojima has is an excellent engine and a base idea that could be expanded into future entries that really take advantage of the possibilities. The game feels a bit rushed as far as the actual content that fills up your game clock. But with a few more story moments mixed into the entire game and a world that's actually interesting and rewarding to explore, I could see myself falling in love.

I've been trying to avoid spoilers because I want to give this a shot on my own. But my friend was saying about 20 hours in, some big story moment happened that pissed him off enough that he put down the game for now. I'm assuming it's some kind of twist or something major that changes the scope of the game based on context clues. Do you have any idea what part he's talking about and if so, did you have a similar reaction?

The Prequel DLC is fun. It's a bit different in that it's more cinematic and environmentally interactive, but it's enjoyable. Definitely helps fill in some gaps for Ellie, too.

I think Cait Sith is a character that is universally hated first playthrough, and gains more clout with each successive playthrough. I know I learned to love him more each time I played. Cloud/Yuffie/Vincent was always a staple party for me. But again, I've played the game so many times, that I have a lot of beloved party setups. Basically, and combo of Cloud/Red/Yuffie/Vincent/Cid/Tifa was my usual go-to, but nowadays, I tend to try and mix up my party enough to keep some extra flavor. I agree about both Tifa and Vincent's limit breaks. Tifa's are vital, whereas Vincent's are a frustrating sacrifice in the name of badassery. Yuffie's actually always been my #1 waifu in the series, despite the hate she used to get from the fanbase, even if her limits are kinda weak. Totally agree on the setting, though. No FF setting has come quite close to capturing that same magic for me, despite having much love for the other games. There's just something about the cyber-punkish, dystopian background with supernatural, fantastical elements and properties that just makes it stand out. The Remake capitalizes on this so hard. I actually started a new game of FF9 on the Switch last year. Thinking I need to get back to crushing that this summer.

1. Final Fantasy VII Remake I put a massive post about this in the Final Fantasy General thread. I'll just put the summary intro/outro posts here. I'm just going to say right now that all around, this game was fantastic. If I want to get nitpicky, which I certainly did at points in the game, I could pull out some flaws that bothered me which I'll cover here. Almost all of these are down things to do with the music or plot changes. But overall, I could understand or appreciate most of the changes because it facilitates the my main judgment of this game: it pays massive homage and respect to the original while forging its own path that is satisfying on its own. Overall, I'll withhold an official opinion on the future of the series until I see it play out. But on its own, the Final Fantasy VII Remake was damn near a masterpiece. It had me deep deep deeeeeeep in the feels with all sorts of nostalgia and appreciation for the new context. The battle system was incredibly handled and loads of fun to experiment with. The music was superb. And regardless of complaints about differences, the story was told so well and incredibly compelling, with some of the best character work I've had the pleasure to experience in a video game. Whether as an old fan or someone new to it, I highly recommend this, and can't wait to start digging into the replay content just so I can experience it all over again.

Oh, yeah, don't get me wrong: I loved MGSV. And I do think it was a fairly natural evolution/reaction to the backlash about IV's heavy cinematics. But as a long time fan of the series, I can see how it's very unlike what the series had presented before. But I never felt like Ground Zeroes was a large departure. To me, it's the bridge that makes the leap in MGSV seem smaller.

I'll back up that I feel like Ground Zeroes is the last one I'd consider to not feel like MGS. Maybe it helps that I saw all the gameplay trailers and development news as it was coming out, but to me it felt like a pretty natural evolution of the style, just including a slightly more open-ended element. Phantom Pain? I can definitely see the argument there. But Ground Zeroes, for me, kinda felt like playing MGS2 on steroids.