I'm going to be brief with this, hopefully my next post will be another Final Fantasy review.

This is for one I don't like, I won't name it just yet.

However, I've been continuing to play this game, even though I don't like it, mainly because I want to give it a fair shake and talk about why. So why is that important?

Balance

In a word, balance. Every reviewer has their own opinions about how a game should be. There are going to be aspects that they like and don't like, and getting a good picture for how a person tends to rate games is necessary to understand the full picture of anything they review, and give it context to be useful to you. You don't know whether you'll like a game by just reading one person's opinion (especially if it's just a number) without an understanding of what matters to them.

For instance, you'll note that in my review of Ratchet and Clank I mentioned that the original controller for the PS2 is kind of important. For me, that's a positive, it means that the hardware I paid for is getting used to its fullest in this case, providing a meaningful improvement to the game through a pretty basic feature of the face buttons. I don't think analog buttons are quite as important as gyro aim, but if you gave me the option between a DualShock 2 and a DualShock 4 to play the original Ratchet and Clank, it should be pretty clear at this point I'd pick the DS2. The DS4 is objectively more modern, and it has all the buttons from the DS2 and even gyro sensors, even if the buttons are all digital, but Ratchet and Clank needs analog buttons more than gyro.

I think for many, if not most people, they might not even notice this. While I suspected it was used for my first few playthroughs, I only really noticed I was using it when someone else pointed it out. You might even think of this as a downside, since how you use the controller will impact how playable the game feels, if you don't experiment a little. It does straight up tell you that the harder you push the button, the faster you'll swim up and down, but everyone knows Atari only put a digital button on their joystick, so surely that's just detected based on how long the button is pressed, even on the PS2, right? It's hard to tell if you don't know what you're looking for.

It was actually trying to play the Uncharted collection on PS4 that finally sold me on the feature in the first place; without the horrible default boat controls in Drake's Deception, I would have never have even thought about analog buttons like this. My own experiences with another game shaped my Ratchet and Clank review. A lot of people will still tell you that analog buttons are useless.

Even more than this, though, is an exploration of what I don't like. What bothers me isn't super clear in a wholly positive review, but you'll certainly have a better picture about how bad a complaint is if you have a worse case to compare it to, especially if I've done a deep dive. The same holds true for any other reviewer.

Why Is a Positive a Positive?

My most recent game review is for Final Fantasy VIII, a game that I love. However, that review turned into a guide halfway through, then came back to reviewing things afterwards. I don't think I could do either of those things justice in just one article, and I do love that game, so I'll probably write more about it later, but the point is that I felt that the complexity of the game is a positive thing. So what kind of complexity do I like? Just like some of the most complex flavors you'll ever taste are from your kid in the kitchen combining every spice in the cabinet in a pan with a single hot dog; not every type of complexity is good.

What I will say about my upcoming review is that it's for a game that very much does not get the same level of mixed reaction that FFVIII is known for. Nobody called it the "worst in the series" to my knowledge, it got good critical reception, for the most part, and it has some serious good parts, even for me.

I don't like to write about one thing for too long. If you scroll through my archives, you'll see that the posts wander in different directions as I explore different topics, and I don't tend to make too many near-repeat posts if I can avoid it. At least I try to rotate topics every other post or so to keep things interesting. However, I don't game like this. I tend to pick a game or series of games, then just tear through it for a long time. I played pretty much just Ratchet and Clank for years, up until I finally got a Steam account, at which point I pivoted to Half-Life, then Borderlands (which I mainly only played 2, but you get the idea), and so on.

So, when I found a Final Fantasy game I don't like right after writing a glowing review of another one, I feel like I need to write about it.

What's Next

Without spoiling too much, I'll say that this particular game is going to make me replay another game that I've finished but not yet reviewed. This might be the first time I start taking notes on the games I'm playing to review, I really enjoy writing these (you'll note I don't make money on my blog in any way right now) and it's completely for fun, so I'm not going to be as detailed as I would like for a while yet. I won't rule out a lot more gaming articles in the near future, as a result.

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