I didn't take to Cyber Sleuth, and in fact it became my first abandoned game of 2016, but you know my stupid Digimon-loving nerd ass is scooping Digimon World: Next Order the exact fucking millisecond it's released. I believe I've made my love of the indefensibly terrible Tamagotchi-style games very clear.

Say what you will about FFXV (And I've said a fucking lot), but its soundtrack highlights are genuinely great. Some of its tunes lean a little too heavily on God Of War style tuneless, vaguely "epic" tracks that set a solid mood but are impossible to remember or whistle, and others are too-insubstantial ditties that…

Shocking absolutely nobody, my biggest negative surprise of the year is surely Final Fantasy XV. I am, after all, the guy who put Episode Duscae on his GOTY list in 2014, citing that it eradicated any doubts I had about the then-upcoming final product. Truly, I was a child in 2014.

Amazing though it may sound, right now I'm still playing Final Fantasy XV, though not for much longer. My initial plan was to at least collect all the magic doohickeys and finish off any quests and hunts that sounded interesting, but I'm already kinda tiring of it. In addition to my gripes with the story, already well…

I haven't played every FF, and most of this is done off the top of my head and subject to change with the direction of the wind, but roughly:

The real Final Fantasy XV was the friends we made along the way.

Regarding one of your points: Prompto is actually best boy.

I ended up abandoning Moon after the third island's first trial out of a combination of boredom and frustration with the series' inability or unwillingness to correct problems it's had for the last 20 years, even while it offers innovations in other areas. But if we're talking teams, here are the six mons I left to…

Nothing hurts as much as life.

I feel kind of bad for designers looking to The Witcher 3 for an answer to the question "how do we make our quests less tedious." I think a lot of the problems in game development are technical problems that can be solved with creative programming, or workarounds, or by holding out until hardware becomes more…

And that Vivienne Westwood, she's a genius!

I've got my playlist on shuffle, and tend to skip tracks I either don't recognize or don't like the sound of after a few seconds, so the experience is more akin to changing the radio station until I find something agreeable. I find that the big bombastic boss fight and epic moment tracks tend to be a poor fit for…

Spoilery comment, avoid if you're worried about that sort of thing:

Huh, I didn't know that (clearly). You learn something new every day on this site.

Flawless.

Real advice: flail and hold the square button instead, at least when you're first starting out. The simplest advice I have for people struggling with the combat system is that you should be phasing at least as much as you attack, if not more. Don't start wailing on enemies until you're sure you have some kind of…

I think 'finesse' is a purely numerical measure of how many parries and counters you performed in a given battle, not actually of how elegantly you fought. More successful parries nets you a higher rating, leading to the strange scenario where fights so efficient that they're over before your enemy can even respond…

So far I have fished once and don't anticipate doing it again. I know this game began production a decade ago and everything, but that fishing minigame is right out of Sonic Adventure. Even if it was the first thing they ever made in the game and it never got updated, if would have still been old-fashioned way back in…

Agree totally about the HUD. I have most of it disabled, and wish I could turn off the bit of text telling me my current mission objective because it's just floating out there in the middle of my screen and looks terrible. It's possible options like this will get patched in later, looking at The Witcher 3 as a…

The Magitek doods are total bastards until you hit them with lightning magic, then you're the bastard. If you aim and time it right you can wipe them all out with a single cast. The magic system is badly underexplained, but very useful in incredibly specific circumstances.