Great job Jeff, this felt like one of Austin Walker's reviews (and I mean that in the best way possible). I've always been more interested in reviews as criticism than buying advice anyway, that's part of why those short-lived post review interviews you guys tried were so great, because it let more of the emotion and stories about why they felt the way they did peak through. This does give me a knee-jerk worry that we won't get any long form criticism anymore, but I doubt that will actually be the case. I think I really just want something dedicated to the merits and context of a game with some real time behind it, rather than something mixed with entertainment (like UPF or the podcast).
Hearing you talk about what's going on frankly and emotionally made me feel so much less anxious about it. I'll still be on ship Old Man Videogames, storms and sunshine. Congrats about the increasing brood too, its got all the people stuff and everything? Dang
It's worth also noting that the first game did have two mutiplayer modes, because the first game had Snap Map where you could build your own levels, and which also included a fairly deep armor customization system. Eternal has skins, the vast majority of which are just palette swaps of the first armor, unless you want to grind out battle pass levels (which rewards more palette swaps) or join the Slayers Club, which is the most gross get-that-marketing-in-the-game shit I've seen in a while.
Since Jeff played it on stream, I've wanted to try Phantasy Star Online and having a private server for us all to wreck play on together sounds like a lot of fun! Hope you guys stay safe and healthy.
I love ff14 dearly, it's easily the best storytelling in an RPG that I've seen in a long time, because it takes MMO hours to get through the story so they can have things like good, detailed character arcs and small interactions that give more depth to side characters. The rest of it isn't bad, but the idea that you would pay money to skip the story to get to the new content, especially because Stormblood is not great, is insane to me. Its like skipping all the movies leading up to Endgame, sure the story gets more interesting but if you skip everything leading up to it then you aren't going to enjoy the new stuff, because it's built on the old.
I think this is a really smart way to do reviews, but it does need some work. I would like to see it be more directed rather than just a conversation (the bombcast already has that), and maybe have more than one person finish the game if possible, so it isn't just a question-and-answer and more of a discussion about the quality of the different parts of the game (sort of like GOTY, but without the need to tear down or build up a game on the top 10). Also, some solid numbers or notes would be useful, like how long did it take to finish? Specific notes on story beats? Notes on specific skills or abilities? How did you feel about the graphics and music, any standout moments in those? Stuff like that.
Charongreed's comments