jack✨

Man I have been struggling to build the motivation to write about this. What a fuckin' thing.

I'll cut to the chase and say that I don't think Final Fantasy XVI is a good videogame. There's some great stuff in there but overall it's a really inconsistent experience and some of my issues with the game go from "this is boring" to "this is so actively offensive I'm surprised they haven't apologised".

Spoilers below the jump.

I wasn't happy with FF16 while I played it, or when it ended. but honestly the more distance I have from it, the more frustrated I become by it. just a story of some of the easiest missed opportunities and unforced errors all the way down with this story

squinting at this headline trying to work out in my head what makes a game worthy enough to be called "good" but not worth 15 dollars. I feel like this must occupy a really narrow slice of existence, where it's quality enough that you're willing to call it "good" - not "mediocre", not "okay" - Good. A positive emotion! But then express reservations that it's worth more than, say, the price of ad removal in an f2p idle game. Surely it can't be that good, then? The deepest marginalia of 'good' exists within this tiny crevice of thought. A good that's almost bad. Or a good that's good, but not as good as spending that 15 dollars on, say, one of 7000 different budget anime porn games on steam. More than Among Us levels of good, surely, for that is only 5 dollars. Perhaps it's exactly as good as the additional content you get for paying 10 dollars for baldur's gate 3's digital deluxe edition, which contains an original soundtrack and artbook? That must be how good overwatch 2's plot missions are. Surely.

-without the strictures of capital-C Critique, the enthusiast press regresses back to a mode where every game is de facto good, because it's a game, and games are good, baby.

There are just different kinds of good games: good games, great games, possibly the greatest game ever? (allowed 1 per month), games that are good enough (the standard can go as low as is necessary in order to deem them good), and so-bad-they're-good games (good). A "good game that's somehow not worth $15" is just another output of this system trying to scream and having no mouth.

Making a little picross engine in 2003, has a lot of things that need to be fixed up, and some features still need to be added, but it's starting to come along.
(All the art in the picross mode is placeholder, and the bg is edited from some tiles from Kickmaster on NES just to have SOMETHING back there while I work on it)