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Final Fantasy VII Well, that was good but I have questions: Who did Red XIII bang? In all seriousness I think Remake/Rebirth kind of spoiled me, I would have enjoyed this more if I played it first. But it did make me even more excited for Part 3, things just kind of happen in VII with no weight given to it, I'm excited to see everything expanded. I also used a bunch of texture packs via 7th Heaven, they looked really good, Square needs to do something official and do a faithful remake/remaster. Grade: A-

Unicorn Overlord Another gem from Vanillaware. In fact, this might be one of their best games to date. This is a spiritual successor to Ogre Battle 64. If you never played it, imagine Fire Emblem except instead of turn based it's real time with pause and instead of moving one soldier at a time you have units made of up to five soldiers all moving as group. There is a rock paper scissors system of sorts in here like in Fire Emblem, but since each unit has multiple soldiers you can arrange them to compensate for each other's weaknesses and also edit their AI to determine when and how they use their various skills. Skirmishes play out automatically and the winner is predetermined based on how well you've set up your unit beforehand, but you can skip the battle scenes if you don't feel like watching them play out. I beat it on hard mode, which offered a reasonable challenge, but by the end of the game my main protagonist was such a beast that his unit could solo 90% of the enemy army, at least until he ran out of stamina and had to rest. I hardly need to tell you that Vanillaware games look good, but this might be the best looking one they've made yet. The story falls back on cliched fantasy tropes with an unambiguously good rebellion against a cartoonishly evil empire, but the characters are still pretty likable and fun to follow anyway. This game also has a pretty impressive localization. Not a difficult platinum trophy either, though this is a long game and it took me roughly 50 hours to finish the campaign.

This is next on my list once I finish P3R, which I'm finally getting close to.