Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is almost here, and while we still have to wait a few more days for the game itself, we can now start talking about how its excellent card game, Queen’s Blood, rivals even FF8's beloved Triple Triad, and how turning the original 1997 RPG into a trilogy may be messing with the story’s pacing in a big way. We’ve also got commentary on a great new Vampire Survivors-style game, why accessibility doesn’t just mean making games easier, and more. 

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth revels in all the extra time you can spend hanging out with the original game’s iconic cast. But it also falls victim to it in a way that not even Remake did four years ago. Square Enix’s plan to recreate Final Fantasy VII as three games seemed questionable when the company announced it back in 2016, and Rebirth exposes the strengths and weaknesses of the approach, which makes examining the game as a standalone product complicated. - Kenneth Shepard Read More

I never played Gigantic when the team-based MOBA shooter was active from 2017 to 2018, or when it was briefly revived in 2023. Now, publisher Gearbox and developer Abstraction Games are reviving the Motiga shooter as Gigantic: Rampage Edition, and when I played a few rounds via a remote preview event, I wondered why the team thought it might find more success today. The sense I got was that the devs no longer consider the hero shooter genre to be as oversaturated as it was seven years ago, and after Overwatch’s gradual decline in mindshare, maybe they’re right to no longer view it as such a threat. - Kenneth Shepard Read More

It’s fair to say that Helldivers 2 is having a good week. Beating GTA V’s concurrent Steam players records, the extraction shooter is outdoing everyone’s expectations, including its own, and it seems this success is spilling over. Because if there’s one source that Helldivers owes the most to, it’s Starship Troopers, and it seems the 1997 film is having its own renaissance. Here’s why you should watch it too. - John Walker Read More

2013 was a great year for games, with groundbreaking titles that pushed the medium forward and helped define an era. There was the post-apocalyptic narrative adventure The Last of Us, which spawned a huge sequel and a hit TV show. There were exciting sequels, like the pirate RPG Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, and the massive crime sim Grand Theft Auto V. Lara Croft got a gritty origin story in the emotionally visceral Tomb Raider reboot and the gut-wrenching puzzler Papers, Please dug into the complicated challenges and choices of immigration inspectors. There were tons of games to enjoy that year, but the one I remember most is Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, the most batshit and memeable game in the long-running espionage franchise. - Levi Winslow Read More

Vampire Survivors might not be the first auto-shoot-’em-up ever made, but it has certainly become the blueprint many clones and imitators have followed since its launch in 2021. One game in that mold, Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, takes that basic formula and does something different, adding mining, guns, and space-dwarves to the mix. The end result? One of my favorite games of 2024 so far. - Zack Zwiezen Read More

Though the Final Fantasy series is infamous for its minigames, it’s never delivered something better than the Final Fantasy VIII card game Triple Triad—until now. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is bursting with more mini-games than you can handle, and while many of them are forgettable, Queen’s Blood stands above the rest. The strategic card game is a wondrous piece of side content and one that finally gives Triple Triad a worthy successor. - Willa Rowe Read More

In 2019, a Forbes opinion article arguing FromSoftware’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice needed an “easy mode” sparked a toxic debate on social media. Like most online debates, it eventually died down, then flared up again whenever another Souls-like game came out. So the reductive misconception of accessibility as “easy mode” continued to spread. - Steve Saylor Read More

If you want to understand how the Final Fantasy VII universe got to where it is today, then you need not look any further than Advent Children. The 2005 animated movie that acts as a sequel to the original 1997 title is something of a flashpoint for the beloved characters. Advent Children paved the way for the once-concise events of a single game to branch off into spinoffs, prequels, sequels, and now a remake trilogy. It is the beginning of the franchise’s inability to let the original game stand on its own. - Willa Rowe Read More