The week without my laptop has been allowing me to charge through some games. Let's see here:
Star Ocean The Second Story R: Still 66% of a great game presented in as playable and forgiving a way as it ever will be... and then the Ten Wisemen come along where it's lowered to a really damn good game. I am aware Star Ocean writing can be much MUCH worse, and this is hardly the first PSOne game to have eyes bigger than its stomach. But you can't just drop all this on the party, and then give the most simplistic explanations and solutions.
Final Fantasy I Pixel Remake: In theory, balancing being able to easily load up healing items to 99 apiece with a higher encounter rate makes sense. In practice, unless you switch off encounters (Which you can easily do, and I did in spots like leaving the early cave with poison creatures), it can be excruciatingly slow before you get the airship, and then ridiculously easy since your dudes are shredded.
The thing is the game's progress is particularly nonsensical, even for 8-bit era, and trying to keep it all in your head while going through 30 encounters to the next clue/place of interest can be maddening.
Let's say the second half out loud to see why this can be hard to piece together, especially when clues and what they lead to can be continents away and 50 battles on all non-airship transport: On the same island system as an active volcano, there is an ice cave which grants you a floating rock. The floating rock raises an airship that works perfectly after being dumped in the desert. After getting a rat's tail to class up (natch), you have to visit the ghost of a mermaid who wants to use a barrel to take you to the bottom of the sea.
But you need an item to breathe underwater. That item is... water. Well, magic faerie water. And you get one by buying a faerie in a bottle some ass sold to a caravan that's doing business in the middle of the goddamn desert with nearly all people continents away. After getting that and completing the water temple, you have to MAKE SURE YOU GET THE ROSETTA STONE THAT'S OBVIOUSLY IN THE WATER TEMPLE. With that, go to the scholar from five villages ago you surely remember who will teach you the language of the keepers of a bell chime. What's it do? Uh, it opens the desert tower. Der. And DON'T FORGET TO GO INTO A WATERFALL TO GET A CUBE FROM AN AUTOMATON!!!
This is a decent version that will meet you however much of the way you need it to. I still prefer the PSOne version with better music and a more authentic presentation with its most infamous and frustrating bug/lack of auto-target able to be toggled on or off.
Alan Wake 2: Not very far into this because my wife wants to see it, and her days off got staggered by a shit co-worker. Also, my son gets seizures. This game makes it clear upfront it is not seizure-friendly, but I still have to be careful.
It looks like Remedy's throwing everything they have at it, and it shows. The optional side material is kind of funny when Saga REALLY needs to be taking care of something, and they put a bunch of dialogue of her partner "gently" urging you to stay on track while he's somewhere else threatening to turn into Robert Patrick from that part of the X-Files we don't talk about or something (Granted, there are about TWO DOZEN things in X-Files/X-Files Returns we don't talk about).
Trails into Reverie: Did you ever watch the extended edition of Return of the King, and think, "You know, after those ten endings, almost the entire story resolved, and as much character detail as anyone would want, it could've used an entirely new villain watching from afar and going, 'It's all going according to plan!' leading to a fourth movie?" Well, you could work for Falcom!
Apparently, it's better than the new arc where they switched to an action RPG, completely stole Xenoblade Chronicles 2's UI, and the writing is showing severe signs of burnout. To be fair, on top of writing 400 hours worth of game, they also had to write four different in-universe novels per game.