Final Fantasy XIV just released Patch 6.1, and with it a whole host of new content. The most drastic addition to the game is the complete overhaul of PvP combat and the replacement of The Feast with a new 5v5 PvP mode called Crystalline Conflict.

Let my character, Rabrandt Razorclaw, and I take you through a few matches to get a feel for it.

For those of you who, like me, really enjoyed Overwatch for about 4-6 months before you dropped it like a lead weight, this setup might look familiar to you. There’s a crystal payload that needs to be delivered to the other side of the map, and our goal is to fight through the enemy team in order to guide it to their side of the map before they can do the same for us. The team that makes it farthest in 5 minutes is the winner, with some overtime allotment if the payload is still being contested when time is up.

The greatest strength of Crystalline Conflict is how short each individual match is. It doesn’t feel anywhere near as bad to lose a 5-minute game as it does to lose a 20-minute (like FF XIV’s own Frontlines) or, gods forbid, a 40-minute match (like you’d have in League of Legends). And because they’re so bite-sized, it’s reasonable to spend an hour or two jamming matches one after the other. I know in the past few days, I’ve spent far more time than I expected too trying to capture the crystal for my team.

Something also needs to be said about how successful the overhaul for PvP has been. A lot of my time playing Frontlines involved fumbling with my hotbar, getting killed before I could pop the ability that would have saved me. This new system simplifies every job into a kit that can be put succinctly into about 8 buttons or less while giving each of them a flavor and identity uniquely their own. The flavor is still contained in that tiny package.

Overall, the team responsible for this should feel very proud of themselves. PvP has always been a dicey aspect of FF XIV. While Frontlines still sucks, this new Crystalline Conflict is perfect for what I want out of the game’s PvP.

(PS: Rewatching this just prior to posting, it’s amusing watching my Dancer play since I’ve switched to playing Warrior since it has far better Crowd Control abilities.)

Now that we’ve discovered that Ultimate Supreme Executive Chairman Drek’s scheme personally affects our hero, Ratchet has finally decided to put a stop to it. We have the coordinates, and all that’s left is to travel back to our home planet, Veldin, and end this mess.

Though the game never pretends that Chairman Drek is anything but selfish and short-sighted, there’s still an impact when he doesn’t even bother pretending that he has any motivation aside from the capitalistic need to consume and profit off of whatever material he can take for himself. If he can make a quick buck by destroying everything around him, you better believe that he will.

In a way, he’s not all that different from Ratchet at the start of the game. They both did whatever felt right for them in the moment, regardless of the consequences. There’s a world in which Ratchet could have worked for Drek, since all he really wanted was to get off his home planet and have fun wrecking whatever we wanted.

And that’s why it’s important for Ratchet to start out as such a massive, egotistical jerkwad. When we get to the end of the game, he has learned to get over himself (even if one could argue that’s only because he has a personal stake in it now). Instead of abandoning his new friend, he takes Clank in and gives him a place to call home. The payoff from that final scene, as he walks away back to his garage, is all the stronger because it’s entirely believable that he would just leave Clank and move on with his life.

Rough as it was, this was the foundation for a franchise that still maintains a huge fanbase even to this day. We’ll continue with it in the future, but for now, we’ll pivot to another popular anthropomorphic protagonist. Next time, we start Sly Cooper and the Thievius Racconus.

At last, our heroes have reached an accord. With the fate of the galaxy at stake, they have an evil corporate executive (or, as I call them, regular corporate executives) to stop.

So let’s stop ‘im.

As the threat is made clear, and Ratchet’s own home planet gets caught up in the crossfire of Ultimate Supreme Executive Chairman Drek’s capitalist real estate venture, he finally sees what he’s been ignoring in the name of his own hedonistic impulses. And at last, he pushes them aside in order to do the right thing. I believe that’s the intended interpretation of the scene in which Ratchet flies into an indignant rage.

However, looking at this same scene from a 2022 lens, I can’t help but draw parallels to the people who don’t care about issues like gun violence, Covid-19, racism in the courts, and so on until they are personally affected by them. Sure, Drek’s been attacking and destroying countless planets in the galaxy for his new planet, but that’s someone else’s problem. Only now, once his own home and garage are under threat, does Ratchet decide that he needs to actually take action. It’s even worse because it’s consistent with his previous hedonistic and antagonist behavior towards anyone who ever slightly inconveniences him.

Needless to say, I understand why Insomniac went through so much effort rehabilitating him in the sequels.

A rift has formed between our heroes. Despite their misaligned goals and mutual animosity, they are driven together by circumstances outside their control, each of them needing something from the other.

Can they keep their tempers in check long enough to see their journey though, or will their bickering lead to their defeat?

Let us find out.

One of the most fascinating aspects of replaying this original game is observing how rough it feels compared to the sequels, where they had greater opportunity to refine the game’s mechanics. Back in 2002, we were still in the design mentality of PlayStation 1-era 3D Platformers, and that fundamental design became core to Ratchet & Clank’s identity.

Though the game was advertised for its various weapons and gadgets, the truth is the gunplay wasn’t as much a core focus as it would become. Most enemies can be easily dispatched with the wrench, and the Bomb Glove we start with can deal with almost anything from close to mid-range. The only weapons one truly needs are either the Devastator or the Visibomb to deal with long-range threats.

Most of what we’re actually doing in the 2002 original is platforming, traversing a map to get from point A to point B. In between segments of jumping, swinging, and puzzling our way around are small sections of combat that rarely take more than a few seconds to resolve. As we start to play later games in the franchise, the balance will start to tip the other way, bringing it closer to the more modern entries, but that will come later.

A lot of what we would come to see as series staples later exist merely in rudimentary forms now. More pertinent to this episode are the concepts of health upgrades, where we can only double our starting health (for a hefty price), and strafing. While strafing does exist in the game, it lacks the smooth controls that we would start to see in the sequel and onward. The fact that the falling animation is recycled for it suggests that it was likely made quickly after a need or desire to see it implemented was detected.

The franchise has come a long way since then, but it’s also made great changes for better and worse. If we ever play the Future games, I would love to go into more detail about it.

We climb, higher and higher, reaching new heights and new obstacles. In the moment, all we can think about is the immediate threat, the immediate foe, and how we must dispatch it in order to continue our ascent. It is a struggle for the vain hope that one day, we will reach the top.

But something happens. Maybe we fail to make a jump and plummet to our death. Maybe a stray bullet catches us for that last, fatal blow. Or maybe, just maybe, we fall to our knees and surrender, no longer able to carry on.

Whatever the case, like the tower’s namesake, we fall, back to the beginning, to begin the ascent once more.

Welcome to the Tower of Sisyphus.

So far, I’m happy with this new mode for Returnal, because it doubles down on some of the better aspects of the game’s design. The arenas are big enough to maneuver in without being so big that getting to the next enemy becomes a slog and the rate at which weapons upgrade makes us feel that sense of progression more acutely than we did back in the base game.

I’m also a fan of the scoring system, and how it rewards and incentivizes players to move and fight quickly, taking more risks in the pursuit of higher scores. It’s not just about the climb, it’s about your performance along the way.

This, along with the recently added suspend feature, might just be what the game needed to go from good to great. I can only hope it’s not too little, too late.

Our adventures with one of the most iconic duos of the PS2 era continue, and in a manner that is perfectly legal, using my original copy and PS2 hardware.

So let us join them in their incredible teamwork. Truly, it is marvel how well Ratchet and Clank get along.

You can find the glitch I referred to for bolt farming here.

Now that we’re here, it’s time to talk about one of the most controversial aspects of the first game, which was the relationship between Ratchet and Clank. Specifically, how their interactions make Ratchet, our protagonist, look like an incredible jerk.

And while I agree that he’s a tool, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Every character has to start somewhere, and for them to have meaningful development they need flaws that they can work towards fixing or correcting. For Ratchet, it’s his hedonistic impulse to do what immediately feels good, whether that’s blowing things up or taking revenge, ignoring the long-term damage and consequences of those actions. The intent isn’t to leave him there, though. As we’ll see later, as he starts to recognize and correct his behavior, growing as a person.

Which is part of why the reboot of this same story, through the movie and its tie-in game, rubbed me the wrong way. In an effort to make it more palatable, they made that version of Ratchet significantly more altruistic from the start. By doing that, they inadvertently removed part of the bite and flavor that drew me into the series in the first place. TheGamingBritShow actually did produced a strong video essay on the two games here.

It’s a shame, but that’s part of what one expects of a series that’s gone on this long.

At last, our time with the Master Chief has come to an end, freeing us up for a new adventure. And what better adventure to start than one with one of my favorite mascot platforming duos, Ratchet and Clank.

We’re going back to the PS2 original, the one that started it all.

If you haven’t already, it’s worth checking out the retrospective from The Golden Bolt that I mentioned in the stream.

It’s strange to play the first Ratchet & Clank game when the series was first getting its feet wet. A lot of the basic features the franchise would later be well-known for, like weapon upgrades, experience, and strafing just weren’t around yet. While it still plays well, there’s a roughness in the mechanics that hasn’t yet been shaken off.

Given the tone of the series now, it’s also refreshing to go back to the era where this series had a strong anti-consumerist bite and humor to it. I don’t hate the direction that it went, but it doesn’t appeal to me as strongly its once did back in this era. It’s not an incorrect or invalid choice, just once that caters to another target market.

I look forward to going back.

It’s a new event in the land of Runeterra, and with it another excellent reason to return. The evil mastermind Veigar has returned in order to conquer Arcadia, and it’s up to us to make sure he doesn’t succeed.

So let’s get started.

What you see here is part of the fun of modes like this. There’s a certain joy a taking a power that we aren’t entirely sure of, only to find that due to how it interacts with cards in our deck, we’ve accidentally created an extremely powerful synergy that can easily carry us. Even if we made a couple of mistakes when building our deck, that wasn’t enough to drag us down.

Events like these are also uniquely fun because they take advantage of the world and cast of characters Riot has built up and invested in since League of Legends came out in 2009. I’m still new to the lore, but I’ve grown more and more fond of it the longer I play Legends of Runeterra.

It’s nice to just have fun, even if Riot isn’t the best company in the world.

It’s been some time since we’ve had an old-fashioned Elusive Target, and this one is both old and new: Old in the sense that it is a target from the 2016 Hitman game, and new in the sense that I had missed it back in the day because I wasn’t playing the Elusive Targets at the time.

So let’s take him out.

Thumbnail by Sam Callahan.

It’s difficult to overstate just how profoundly embarrassing that attempt was from start to finish. “They wouldn’t put the safe in Margolis’s room,” I said without putting any further thought into it. That one baseless assumption must have wasted at least a solid 30 minutes of time. And then to follow that up, one the run where I went for the kill is the same one where I forgot to grab my poison from my stash. Just a ton of failures all at once.

And yet, that’s part of Hitman. We can’t always complete the perfect or even a competent kill. That’s just how it be sometimes.

Our adventures with the Master Chief have felt like they’ve been shooting towards an end for a few hours now, and yet they’ve kept pushing forward. Now that we’ve reached the Silent Auditorium, we’re actually on the verge of finally finishing off the campaign.

This is it. Either we finish Halo: Infinite, or we’ll be finished with it.

While I’m not impressed with the story as a whole, I admit that there’s a lot of good character work between Chief and his allies, the Weapon and the Pilot. They have strong chemistry, which is of little surprise since the actors have been in those roles for a long time, but it adds to the depth of their relationship. We do lose something from not being able to see the Chief’s face, but accepting that limitation they do a good job using his body language and voice acting to tell us what he’s feeling at a given moment. It’s easily the strongest aspect of the plot.

The problem is that everything else is completely forgettable. And when the story is trying to set up for another game, that’s a problem. I wasn’t around for the Halo 2 campaign when Master Chief said he was going to “finish the fight”, but even I know how it left fans frothing for more. However, it fell completely flat when they attempted to invoke it here in Halo: Infinite. Even worse, we still don’t know what The Harbinger unleashed in the finale, so there’s no context for us to speculate or get hyped over.

It’s not a bad campaign, but I can’t say it’s going to stick with me the way the original trilogy did. It’s such a shame.