Spent a lot more time playing Final Fantasy VII Remake today; I'm now about 10 hours into it. To give you an idea of how much more substantial this is than the original, that puts me at the point after Cloud has just walked Aerith home for the first time, and it's looking like I'm about to have another "sidequest central" area.

The game looks set to alternate between these sort of "hub" areas where you take on smaller sidequests, and lengthy sequences of plot-critical stuff that is relatively linear. During the plot-critical stuff, there are no sidequests to distract you, which is a good choice; there are, however, some of those aforementioned "Discoveries" I talked about yesterday, which it turns out aren't just for getting to know characters better — they also do things like highlighting optional treasures that you might not want to miss. In one sequence, for example, they led to the Choco-Mog summon materia, which is as much of a delight as you might expect.

Aerith is great. I'm not sure how I feel about her protesting very sweetly that she isn't a princess that needs treating gently, and then lets out a "Shit!" when she's having trouble climbing up something, but the combination of gentleness and sass she has going on has always appealed to me, ever since the original.

Probably the highlight for me so far, though, is how much more fleshed out the other Avalanche members are. There are some fantastic sequences involving them with some genuinely hilarious dialogue. The "I'm really sorry about your ass" sequence springs immediately to mind here.

Anyway, I played until 1am, so I should probably get some sleep now! Doubtless there will be more of this tomorrow, but I'll probably make some time for Atelier Iris 3 too… probably…

Spent four hours with Final Fantasy VII Remake this evening and it's confirmed several things I suspected about it.

Firstly, that although it is rooted in love and respect for the source material, it is best to treat it as a whole new game. After all, we're talking about something that is expanding what was five hours of the original game at most into a 35+ hour game. That means there's a lot of new stuff. New areas to visit, new characters to interact with, new storylines, new setups for various situations, new contexts for events you might be familiar with.

Secondly, the mechanics represent a blend of all the best bits of more recent Final Fantasy games — specifically, XII, XIII and XV in particular. It works really well, and it sidesteps a lot of the commonly cited issues people tend to bring up when talking about those particular installments. The combination of XV's rhythmic basic attacks with XIII's Active Time Bar management and XII's somewhat more "open" structure is pretty great; combat is pacy and interesting, and it's especially enjoyable when you're managing multiple characters. The first boss battle in the Mako Reactor remains a great showcase of this.

Thus far I'm coming towards the end of chapter 3, which is where Cloud and company arrive home in the Sector 7 slums. This is expanded considerably over some fairly brief, exposition-centric scenes in the original; there are six sidequests to take on, for example, and accomplishing all these gives you the opportunity to pursue a "discovery" — in this case, spending a bit of time with Tifa "off the clock", as it were.

Rather nicely, rather than expecting you to wander all over the map looking for people who might have quests for you, starting a chapter immediately unlocks the sidequests (except for those with prerequisites), so you always know exactly where to go. And the game does a great job of making the random NPC chatter as you wander around react to what you've been doing. They've really done a great job here.

I'm going to spend some more time with it over the long weekend — but I haven't forgotten about Atelier, don't you worry yourself!

I gave Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl – Gold a quick go earlier, as I wanted something I could have a quick bit of fun with over lunch before settling down with something more substantial over the coming long weekend. And I'm thoroughly enamoured with it already!

As Chris noted on our recent podcast, Snack World is a wonderfully silly, post-modern setting that pokes fun at pretty much everything, and does a fine line in puns that rival Final Fantasy XIV in terms of their frequency and ferocity.

What I wasn't expecting was for the gameplay to have a certain amount in common with Final Fantasy XIV, too, despite being more of a Diablo-style action RPG. Combat is a little more measured and timing-based than Blizzard's classic, and of particular note are the visible telegraphs that enemies put out for their various attacks. This side of things really culminates in the boss battles, which feature strong elements of pattern recognition and understanding how to "do mechanics". Appropriate for a game with a multiplayer element!

I haven't played far in the game as yet, but I'm thoroughly charmed, and intend on dipping in and out of it over time. I'll write something up on it when I've got a bit more of a feel for what's going on — there are seemingly lots of very interesting mechanics to figure out in here!

I'm having a real blast with Atelier Iris 3 (and, pleasingly, I'm getting through it nicely ahead of schedule, too, as I still have at least a couple of Iris 2 articles I want to post!) — I'm really glad I've finally got around to playing these.

Iris 3 does something that I absolutely love in RPGs — putting a layer of deliciously "video game" abstraction atop the battle mechanics, making it highly enjoyable to engage with, whether you're fighting bosses or just grinding through random enemies.

The highlight for me is the "Burst Chain" system, whereby hitting enemies adds to a meter at the bottom of the screen, and filling this up then whacking the enemy as many times as possible before it either runs out or you kill everything results in experience and money bonuses. Pretty much every action you take, be it normal attack, physical skill or spell, hits more than once, so there are various ways of building up both the Burst meter and the Chain bonus — getting to grips with the different ways of doing this makes each battle feel like a puzzle to be solved.

And the characters are great, too. I'm absolutely 1,000% in love with Nell, but that's a discussion for a whole other day, I think. Now to figure out how to juggle playing this and FFVII Remake…

Final Fantasy VII Remake arrived today. That's a surreal feeling — a game that several of my friends and I hoped would one day happen is finally reality. Perhaps not in exactly the form we imagined when we were teenagers, but if the excellent demo was anything to go by, I'm looking forward to getting stuck into it. Conveniently, there's a 4-day weekend coming up for Easter, so I may get some time in with it then.

I'm a little hesitant to jump in, because although I'm tremendously excited about it, I'm also enjoying Atelier Iris 3 a lot, and I don't want to fall off that wagon. I'm also in two minds as to whether or not I should record my FFVII Remake playthrough with the intention of publishing it alongside old-school FFVII in the Final Fantasy Marathon when I eventually get that far. Or perhaps I can just play it again when the time comes; the rate I'm going with that series, it'll be a long time before I get to FFVII anyway!

But anyway. I've been steering clear of spoilers, I haven't read anything about the game (aside from friend of MoeGamer Matt Sainsbury's comments promoting his glowing review on DigitallyDownloaded.net) and I nearly didn't even try the demo. I'm glad I did, though; it gave me confidence that I'm going to have a good time with the Remake.

Now to find 100GB from somewhere…

"Have a good meeting." That's what Skype for Business says every time my heart sinks and I join a conference call that I know is largely irrelevant to me, in which I inevitably won't say anything whatsoever, and which causes my very soul to leak out of my ears a tiny little dribble at a time.

I hate meetings, whether they're in person or online. I don't like dealing with people. I especially don't really like listening to other people drone on about things I don't give a shit about. And my Tuesdays at the day job involve literally an entire morning of conference calls like this.

We open with the "Good Morning Call", which is over an hour of a bored-sounding Frenchman slowly going through our (awful) project management tool and reading everything out. And after that, we have individual business segment meetings, in which a bored-sounding Frenchman slowly goes through our (awful) project management tool and reads out the parts that are relevant to the business segment managers we have on the call. Then we have the meeting to update the regional representatives for whom we do stuff, in which a bored-sounding Frenchman slowly goes through the "Weekly Call" notes from our (awful) project management tool and whoever's name appears at the top of the slide has to read out what it says.

It's utterly soul-destroying, pointless and a complete waste of time, but there's a silver lining while we're all working from home: today I slept through this entire parade of bullshit. I set my alarm for five minutes before the start time of each one, joined the call, made sure I wasn't needed to talk about anything in particular (I never am, except in the last one) and then just napped through each of them, accompanied by my cats and a nice warm duvet.  I then had a thoroughly productive afternoon, very much refreshed from the morning's activities. 

I could get used to this working from home lark.

My review of Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories for Switch went live today on Nintendo Life — you can check it out at  https://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/nintendo-switch/disaster_report_4_summer_memories. As always, if you have a moment to give it a click and show there's a "market" for coverage of lesser-known games on more mainstream sites, please do so!

One interesting thing came up, looking at the comments. (I know, I know, don't) A couple of people mentioned Push Square's review of the game, which rated it 3/10, seemingly primarily on the grounds that there is the option to act like a reprehensible asshole at numerous points throughout the game.

Thing is; that's sort of the point of Disaster Report 4: it's a game about the human response to a crisis, and how some people approach a situation like that keen to help everyone, while others, regrettably, take the opportunity to let loose and act like the asshole they've always wanted to be. Or perhaps they just see an opportunity to see what it's like to be a complete shit; everyone else is already suffering, after all; it can't hurt, can it?

That's not a reason to mark the game down, though, in my eyes. I find this side of Disaster Report 4 fascinating. You most certainly come into contact with more than your fair share of assholes over the course of the game's main narrative, so it's fitting that you have the option to be one too. I didn't in my playthrough, because I find it legitimately difficult to play a game with moral choices as a "bad" person, and some of the options you get in Disaster Report 4 are really bad. But I appreciate the option being there.

In fact, I'm sorely tempted to do a playthrough on video where I simply attempt to be the biggest, most reprehensible asshole there ever was to walk the streets after a major earthquake. I'm genuinely curious to see what effect it has on the story — if any.

If there's any interest in that, let me know! It's not as if I'm short of time right now, and Warriors Wednesday is coming to a (perhaps temporary) close this week, so…

I'm grateful that I've never really had to deal with any major issues in the community surrounding the work that I do. I think this is — hopefully, anyway — due to the fact that my work itself sets certain expectations, and makes it clear that I have no patience for anyone who is going to be a dick about things. That doesn't mean people can't have fun, of course, but it means that people can't be a dick.

A friend of mine runs a reasonably active, moderately sized Discord server. A while back, there was a user there who frequently caused trouble, often getting into arguments and becoming disproportionately angry towards people who really didn't deserve any ire at all, let alone the amount of rage he was flinging at them. He left once, then asked to come back. He left again, then asked to come back. Then he left again, and my friend told him that this was it; if he asked to come back again, he would be refused.

Right now, he's in my friend's DMs trying to guilt-trip him into taking him back into the server. The guy in question has pretty severe autism and clear anger management issues, but is unwilling to do anything about them despite the fact that he recognises they are both a problem. Instead, he prefers to offload his problems onto others and blame them for him lashing out. It's a difficult situation for my friend, who doesn't want to come across as being mean or discriminatory towards someone suffering with genuine, rather strong mental health issues, but the conversation in the server since this guy has left has been much lighter, more pleasant and more open.

People who were hesitant to speak up now discuss things without fear of being shouted down without provocation. People (for the most part, anyway) respectfully discuss their opinions without putting others down. And while disagreements still happen, they're generally resolved pretty quickly rather than being constantly brought up as ongoing grudges.

I don't envy my friend for having to deal with this, particularly as I know he's much too nice to just block the dude and be done with him. But I'm also glad — and grateful — that people like you lovely lot have never given me any trouble; and in exchange, I hope I've never given you any grief either! Thanks for that!

Dang. We really do live in an amazing age of video games. I'm just looking back over the things I've written about on MoeGamer and Nintendo Life recently, and the sheer breadth of experiences it's possible to have these days continually astounds, astonishes and delights me. I love it.

Just recently, I've been playing the Psikyo shooters, Atelier Iris, Disaster Report 4, Dead or School, SeaBed, NinNinDays and numerous others. And they're all things I'm very happy I've spent my time with.

I want to revel in the wonderful experiences I'm able to have while the whole "pandemic lockdown" thing is in effect. I can flit off and explore myriad other worlds, some of which are dark and depressing and others of which are vibrant and full of life. I can experience stories ranging from the silly to the heart-wrenching via the utterly mundane; I can meet characters I love, loathe and love to loathe. I can step into the shoes of someone else; someone who can leave the house for reasons other than buying cheese; someone whose life has meaning, and who is able to make the world better for others, simply by existing in some cases.

Video games are fantastic. And right now is the perfect time to enjoy them. So I'm doing just that!

Finished Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories today, including its lengthy epilogue chapter (which I assume was DLC at one point). What a marvellous, wonderful, janky old mess of a game that is. I'll be penning a review of it for Nintendo Life in the next couple of days along with a more lengthy analysis on MoeGamer, but suffice to say if you can get over some of the worst graphics performance I've ever seen on a home console, there's an absolutely fascinating experience to be had here.

It's probably the fact that I've absolutely binged it over the last couple of days, but I feel like it's one of those games that sticks with you. I keep thinking about it when I'm not playing it, and its atmosphere is such that it makes you grateful to remain safe — especially at times like this, with the world undergoing a disaster of a completely different kind at the moment.

It's also an example of a kind of game I really like: one that truly allows you to feel like you're immersing yourself in another culture. There are quite a few games out there that make you feel like you're "living the Japanese life", but I've never played one like this, where you're a normal person in Japan under circumstances that are anything but "normal". That said, the game does drive home that Japan, as a nation, has developed the ability to respond to disasters in a timely, efficient manner — and that in some cases, people see a massive, deadly earthquake almost as more of an inconvenience than anything they should actually be terrified about!

Having beaten the game and been teased by the epilogue with a number of characters and side stories I didn't encounter or resolve in my main playthrough, I'm tempted to go through it again, but not just yet; I need to get back to Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm! Perhaps I'll consider a "New Game Plus" video series at some point in the future, using the knowledge I picked up on this first playthrough to see exactly what I can achieve in a second time around.

Or just to be a complete bastard instead of the nicey-nice goody-two-shoes I was in this run. Although I'm not sure I can actually bring myself to do that. I went in to the game with the full intention of seeing what would happen if I was "bad" but something about witnessing the initial disaster right at the beginning of the game just made me think "err… maybe I'll help people out a bit".

Anyway. Time for bed, for dreams of earthquakes, perhaps.

$5 Patrons, I've received this month's payments now, so a wallpaper will be heading your way in the next couple of days!