Paper Trail Is a Nice Little Character Study

Developed by Newfangled Games, Paper Trail casts players as Paige, a young woman who leaves home to go to university in a nearby city. On her trip, she traverses several unique and beautiful environments with help from her ability to essentially fold time and space, like paper, and players learn more about a major tragedy in her past.

I liked the writing in Paper Trail. I hesitate to call the game cozy, because it does deal with some rather serious themes, but the plot is relatively airy. You’re not going on a journey to save the world or in any way alter it. Paige is going to university. Along the way, you learn about who she is, and what’s driving her to make a change in her life. It’s a nice little character study, and I found it pretty refreshing. Those sorts of more character-centric stories are something I’ve noticed popping up in a lot of the best puzzle games, and I’m glad Paper Trial followed suit in that way.

I can definitely see people being disappointed that Paper Trail doesn’t do more with some of its central plot threads, opting instead for something simpler and more personal. However, it’s best to understand the game as something of a short story. Paper Trail is a snippet from a person’s life, and that’s very refreshing.

Paper Trail Looks & Sounds Beautiful

Paper Trail is beautiful. Flat out. The aesthetic is an incredible little mishmash of watercolor, printmaking, and video game art that fits perfectly with the core conceit of folding the world like paper. Every environment feels unique, and Paper Trail is just such a treat for the eyes.

The music and sound design are also really excellent. In general, Paper Trail‘s music is chill. It does a great job of setting the stage and making environments feel distinct. There’s also an excellent song that plays over the end credits.

Also, listen. I need to tell you about the voice acting, because it’s so funny. In Paper Trail, everyone except Paige talks kind of like a muted trumpet. It’s an odd choice in the grand scheme of the game — though I understand that voice actors are expensive — but it’s one that made me smile a little each time I interacted with someone. It’s kind of bizarre, and I loved that about it.

Paper Trail Is Fun, But a Bit Easy

Mechanically, Paper Trail is relatively simple. Each area that Paige passes through on her journey has a frontside and a backside, and you can fold the sides and corners to create new paths to get yourself to a level’s exit. Things get increasingly complicated as the game goes on, though, and the title introduces players to a lot of different new mechanics as they go, such as sliding platforms, statues, lasers, and a bunch of other things. One of the things that Paper Trail does best is carry those new mechanics forward. New levels always feel iterative, teaching you about their own special rules and then asking you to integrate them with what you’ve learned in the past. That makes for some really satisfying puzzle solving.

Overall, though, I didn’t find Paper Trail specifically very hard. Some puzzles were definitely more difficult than others, but more often than not, my struggles were due almost entirely to overthinking a challenge. Still, I found the “ah-ha!” moments where I got the right solution to a puzzle to be immensely satisfying.

In addition to trying to get to the exit of an area, different Paper Trail levels have origami that the player can pick up. These are often a bit more challenging to get, so I found that they did help to keep the game from feeling too simple during the longer stretches where I was able to more intuitively finish a level.

The Game Is Pretty Short

Paper Trail is short, which I get. It’s an indie game developed by a small team. I’m not expecting some massive, epic experience. However, I beat the game in less than ten hours, which does mean it’s on the shorter end. While I’m satisfied with the plot and the puzzles overall, I do think that a few extra hours with Paige and some harder puzzles could have taken the game from good to truly great.

Verdict: Recommended

Paper Trail is a pretty game that, while not too difficult, is definitely worth checking out for fans of puzzle games.

A PlayStation 5 review code for Paper Trail was provided by the publisher. The game will release on May 21.

The number is 213-25-VAULT. For those unfamiliar with how to enter letters into a phone, that’s 213-258-2858, which is a Los Angeles number. When you call the number you will, of course, be met with a ton of screaming. It’s not clear why, but if you ever need the sounds of a person screaming in a pinch, well, Vault-Tec has you covered!

If you don’t want to actually call the number (for example, you may not want your significant other or boss to hear screaming coming from your phone for no reason, and that makes sense) or you’re in an area where that’s not possible, here’s a video of what happens that was posted on X by @TheNastyJ.

Created by Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Fallout debuted on Prime Video on April 10. It’s an adaptation of the video game series of the same name, which began in 1997. The Fallout series takes place in a post-apocalyptic world in which pretty much everything has been wiped out by nuclear war.

Prime Video’s Fallout specifically follows Lucy MacLean, a resident of Vault 33 who enters the Wasteland in order to look for her father, Hank MacLean, who is kidnapped by raiders. Along the way, she encounters Howard, as well as Maximus, a young squire of the Brotherhood of Steel. The series is full of twists and turns that result in some pretty major implications for the franchise’s existing canon.

Overall, reception to Fallout has been positive, and at the time of writing, the show holds a 92 percent among critics on Rotten Tomatoes. The audience score isn’t far behind at 85 percent.

I’ve been a fan of the Fallout franchise since around 1998, when I borrowed my brother’s copy of the original game and installed it on a laptop that, by modern standards, would be less powerful than my TV. I’ve been obsessed with the lore for a long time, and after having watched all of the Prime Video series, I’m here to tell you: It changes a lot, specifically in regards to Fallout: New Vegas.

War Sometimes Changes, I Guess

Overall, Fallout is a pretty accessible show to those who haven’t played the games, and it generally gives you the information that you need to know. For the most part, the first half of the episodes don’t rely too heavily on anything from the games, choosing instead to mostly just provide a few winks and nods. However, it’s in the back half of the show that things really start to engage with existing canon.

The original reason I intended to write this article before actually going into a several hundred word screed on canon, is that Prime Video’s Fallout seems to confirm that it was Vault-Tec, not China, that dropped the bomb that started the nuclear apocalypse. The details are still a bit fuzzy, and it’s possible they’ll be reconciled later, but yeah. That’s a pretty massive re-write, and a confirmation of a long-time fan theory, that turns Vault-Tec from sinister corporation into the literal capitalist ghouls who ended the world. That’s neat. However, there’s something I’m even more interested in after having finished Season 1.

Towards the end of Season 1, viewers discover that Shady Sands has been destroyed. For fans of the games, that’s a pretty big deal. Shady Sands is one of the first locations you go to in Fallout, and it’s from there that the New California Republic (NCR) starts. The group is a major player in the Fallout Universe and is, generally speaking, a sort of “Good” option for those wanting to restore order and civilization to the post-apocalyptic Wasteland.

It’s not totally clear what the destruction of Shady Sands and a main hub for the NCR means for the wider NCR in the USA, but it’s pretty clear that, at least in California, they’re on the outs. By the end of Season 1, the last enclave is wiped out pretty much entirely by a particularly fanatical version of the Brotherhood of Steel, making it clear that the NCR is far past its prime.

Part of this ties into the Fallout TV series’ awkward relationship with Fallout: New Vegas. Of the modern Fallout games, New Vegas is the only one that wasn’t developed by Bethesda, who only served as publisher on the project. Instead, it was made by Obsidian Entertainment, who are known for titles like Pillars of Eternity and Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. A lot of fans love New Vegas, but it’s also often seen as a kind of neglected entry in the franchise, causing some people to think that Bethesda actually resents it. There’s no indication that’s really the truth, and Bethesda’s Todd Howard has expressed his positive feelings about the game in the past.

Still, what happens in Prime Video’s Fallout is unlikely to quash rumors that Bethesda doesn’t like New Vegas.

The final shot of Prime Video’s Fallout actually takes viewers back to New Vegas. Well, specifically a version of the city that’s been utterly destroyed. It’s not entirely clear how this is meant to square with franchise canon. Not to get too into the nitty-gritty of it, Fallout: New Vegas essentially comes to an end in around 2281 or 2282. The TV show takes place in about 2296. That means in around 15 years, one of the biggest cities has been utterly destroyed by forces unknown and the NCR is a shell of its former self.

A lot of fans online have seemed pretty annoyed about this already, and honestly, I understand why, even if I don’t necessarily agree. I don’t think, though, that the Fallout TV show has necessarily de-canonized New Vegas. Instead, it’s trying to deal with the difficulty that is existing in the canon of a franchise that relies on choice while being a TV series that can only tell its story one way.

At the same time, the Fallout franchise relies heavily on choice, and the endings have always been an immaculate showcase of that. They’re a way of seeing what the long-term implications of your choices are on the world around you. The Fallout TV series just can’t accommodate those choices, and in doing so, it can make it feel like the player’s choices didn’t matter. Canonically, no matter what you did, the NCR and New Vegas ended up in shambles. That’s deeply difficult to accept.

I get where people are coming from in disliking the changes that Prime Video’s Fallout has made to the franchise canon, specifically in regards to New Vegas. That was always going to be part of the challenge of making a live-action adaptation of the series, but I did really enjoy the show overall, so I want to give it a chance and see just what happened canonically to lead to the downfall of New Vegas and the NCR. If that choice leads to a better story, well, I’m fine with that.

Fallout is available now on Prime Video.

Dragon Ball Super Chapter 103, which deals with the aftermath of Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, features a message at the end from “The English Language Team Dragon Ball Super” that reads, We’re all deeply saddened by the news of Toriyama sensei’s passing. His work is an inspiration to all. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, friends, and all the fans who were touched by his work.

You can see the page below.

Dragon Ball Super Chapter 103 is billed as being written by Akira Toriyama and illustrated by Toyotarou. Caleb Cook translated the latest installment of the series, with Brandon Bovia lettering. While the manga does align quite a bit with the anime, there are a fair number of places where the plot diverges, and there are entire storylines that may never make it into the anime.

The Dragon Ball franchise started in 1984 with the original manga of the same name. That manga was later adapted into an anime that gave way to such sequels and spin-offs as Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball GT, Dragon Ball Super, and, in the future, Dragon Ball Daima, which Toriyama was heavily involved with. Outside of the manga and anime, the Dragon Ball franchise has made its way into virtually every medium, including but not limited to video games, trading card games, and action figures.

At the time of writing, MANGA Plus still has Dragon Ball Super Chapter 104 slated to release on May 20. It’s unclear at this time if that will change, but if it does, we regularly update a release schedule for the manga here.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve accepted that a lot of folks whose work I really love are, inevitably, going to be gone, and I pay tribute to them in my own way. When David Bowie died, I listened to “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.” When Robin Williams died, I watched Aladdin. Doing so felt right, and a way to acknowledge the profound effect their work had had on my life. It’s been different with the death of Akira Toriyama, though, because his effect on my life feels, in retrospect, so massive.

The first time I can consciously remember engaging with Toriyama’s work was when I was 12. A few years before, my mom had moved away from our hometown to go to college, leaving me behind with my dad and my brother. With me set to enter junior high, we figured it was finally time for the rest of the family to make the move and follow her to the big city, which was several hours away by car.

Before that happened, though, my parents left me at my grandparents place for a few weeks to spend some time with them. My grandparents were the kind of people who understood that they didn’t really have any good way to connect with a 12 year old, and they were relatively scared of boring me to death. So to give me something to do, they called up their cable company — a thing you used to do back in the day — and got them to add the premium cartoon channel to their package.

That was the summer that I realized my grandparents probably didn’t entirely understand the effects of caffeine and sugar. Early in the trip, they handed me a bag of chocolate covered coffee beans and gave me access to cases of Pepsi. Neither ever seemed to run out. As a result, I developed insomnia, and during the long nights, I watched a ton of cartoons. That’s how I saw Dragon Ball Z for the first time.

I’d never seen anything like Dragon Ball Z before. I had a vague, hazy experience with Japanese media prior to that thanks to Pokémon, but otherwise the whole thing was new to me. I came into the show around the beginning of the “Cell Saga,” and I’d watch three or four episodes every night. Part of the genius of Toriyama’s storytelling was that, even if the lore could at times be a bit confusing, it wasn’t very hard to get into Dragon Ball Z. The show was wildly accessible.

Outside of the really cool action scenes and the generally interesting ideas is the plot and characters. Jumping to a slightly higher level understanding of the story, so much of Dragon Ball Z deals with what it means to be outmatched and to still keep going. It’s something of a trope in shonen anime at this point for the hero to respond to hardship by just persevering and getting stronger, but at the time, I’d never really experienced that in media. Dragon Ball Z treats tenacity and bravery as the most important virtues. At the same time, it also understands the importance of embracing your own power and doing the best you can to make the world a better place.

Related: How Dragon Ball Z and Kai Are Different

The “Cell Saga” is so much about that. With Goku becoming an adult in Dragon Ball Z, Gohan is meant to be the character you connect with as a child, and it’s in large part the story of how he learns to embrace his own power and stop being so afraid. It’s how he starts to develop the same tenacity that helped Goku defeat, well, pretty much every enemy with whom he’d ever come into contact, but especially Frieza.

What essentially happens is this: Cell, who is a creation of Dr. Gero, absorbs Androids 17 and 18 to become Perfect Cell, a massive jerk that pretty much just wants to kill. Cell decides to host a tournament to test his powers against Earth’s mightiest heroes. In the ensuing battle, a lot of key characters die or nearly die, including Goku. However, the most important death is arguably that of Android 16, another creation of Dr. Gero.

Based on the mad scientist’s deceased son, Android 16 is something of an anomaly. While the other Androids are generally — at least until their redemption — depicted as villainous, he’s generally pretty kind and gentle. He cares a ton about life and protecting it. This causes him to become close with Gohan. However, Cell — doing what he does best — kills Android 16. This causes Gohan to snap and finally embrace his powers. In that moment, he becomes tenacious and brave.

A huge part of that is the speech Android 16 gives Gohan before he dies. He tells him “it is not a sin to fight for the right cause,” and makes clear that when it comes to people like Cell, sometimes you have to do what needs to be done. Gohan is afraid of his own power, but that power is simultaneously the only thing that can help him protect the Earth and those he cares about. To defeat Cell, Gohan has to first defeat the part of himself that’s so afraid. He does, and Gohan proceeds to absolutely wreck Cell.

As a kid, this spoke to me in a major way, because at the time I was moving, everything in my life felt so much like it was in flux. I couldn’t make myself fall asleep because I was too blitzed out on caffeine and sugar. I’d been getting bullied at school for years, and now I was going to a place where I didn’t even have the few friends I had. I felt powerless. However, seeing Gohan embrace his inner power for the right reasons helped me understand how I should approach the world.

When you’re on the cusp of adulthood, there’s something really powerful in that message. Dragon Ball Z, for all its other faults, exemplifies a lot of traits of a more positive masculinity that, especially at the time, weren’t really that prominent in Western media. It’s deeply concerned with what it means to help others and what it means to keep fighting. You won’t always win — but you’ve got to try. In the face of everything that sucks in the world, tenacity and bravery are what matters. That’s a lesson I’ve carried through my life.

Although I’ve focused on Dragon Ball Z above, it’s not the only part of Toriyama’s work that affected my life in a profound way. When I got a bit older, I learned that he’d been the artist behind one of my favorite games, Chrono Trigger, and one of my favorite series: Dragon Quest. They’re a massive part of why I love video games and am literally writing at this moment an article for a pop culture website. There’s a straight line between those three properties and my current career.

I do want to focus on Dragon Quest specifically for a moment, though. I played a ton of Dragon Quest growing up, and I still really value my time with those games. When she wasn’t at work, my mom would often sit down with me and play Dragon Quest. While she was away, I’d call her, asking for her help to figure out where I was supposed to go to progress. I specifically remember her looking up guides for Dragon Quest 7 for me, because I had absolutely no idea where to go at one point and had been wandering the world for days on end. Dragon Quest represented a point where my mom and I could connect, and Toriyama’s art was the visual backdrop to our relationship.

I fell in love with so much of Toriyama’s work without even realizing it. Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Quest, and Chrono Trigger opened up the world of Japanese media to me. That love of Japanese media eventually led to me teaching English in Japan, where I met my now wife. Toriyama’s work was both my entry point and my strongest connection with that culture’s art. I don’t know if I would have been interested enough in Japan to have actually moved there if it hadn’t have been for him.

Toriyama and his work remain proof that art change your life in ways that you’d never expect and teach you important lessons about how to live in a world that is so often difficult to live in. And for that, I want to say thank you.

Aerith Gainsborough

Aerith, I love you, but I hate playing you.

Part of the issue with Aerith in FF7 Rebirth is that she’s not particularly well-suited to how the franchise has evolved since Remake. Ranged characters in the sequel really struggle because the combat is significantly more action-oriented, which means when you’re playing Aerith, you can often end up getting rushed by a ton of enemies. She’s not really built to handle that sort of fighting, so I found myself only switching to her if absolutely necessary. Solo sections with her were also a massive challenge that I didn’t, in general, enjoy, owing in large part to her relatively slow attack animation.

Aerith isn’t all bad, though. Her abilities and Limit Breaks can be wonderful if they’re used correctly. She’s without a doubt the most capable natural healer in the game. Still, whereas I loved Aerith in Remake, I found her lacking in Rebirth.

Barret Wallace

Like Aerith, Barret suffers due to FF7 Rebirth‘s changes to combat. He also doesn’t have any real melee weapons, so he’s really not suited to every situation, and it’s harder to take advantage of his relatively high amount of HP because of that. Playing as Barret can also be a bit… boring. It’s a lot of holding down the shoot button and then dodging when enemies start attacking you.

Barret edges out Aerith for me just a bit, as he’s got better survivability. He’s relatively helpful when it comes to taking down enemies in the air as well, and I found he made a pretty competent ranged magic user. As such, Barret was in a fair number of my parties, but I didn’t actually enjoy playing him that much. Generally, I only switched to him to use spells, and then it was right back to someone else.

Cait Sith

This is a hard one for me. I like Caith Sith in FF7 Rebirth. He’s got some absolutely devastating abilities, including one that just lets him use a summon’s ability out of nowhere. He also had a lot of really nice effects that were good for enhancing the rest of my party and getting them to perform better, like boosting critical rates.

The problem with Cait Sith is his moogle. You’ve got to charge up an ATB gauge to get your moogle, and most of your abilities require you to have him. Assuming the moogle doesn’t get immediately melted like he does in many of the boss battles in FF7 Rebirth, Cait Sith becomes more difficult and annoying to control. Once you’ve got the hang of him, he’s good! However, until that happens, he’s not. He only barely edges out Barret on this ranked list, because I do think he’s a bit better once you get used to him.

Red XIII

Red XIII is a very good boy. Designed to operate as the party’s tank, Red XIII fits really well in a lot of different types of parties. That’s in large part due to his Vengeance Mode, which gives him additional powers after he’s blocked some damage. Since the friendly AI loves to block, it’s pretty easy to switch to Red XIII during a fight and just activate Vengeance Mode and really start dealing damage. Also, if you slap a Provoke Materia on him, all the better!

The only real issue with Red XIII is that he’s not necessarily as good as some of the other characters on this list. Part of that has to do with the fact that I don’t really think you need to lean into defensive characters in FF7 Rebirth, since the combat is relatively fast-paced. He’s got his uses — and he’s a big part of one of my end game parties — but he’s not in every party that I make.

Related: All Region Maps in Final Fantasy 7 (FF7) Rebirth

Cloud Strife

You’ll spend most of FF7 Rebirth playing Cloud, and a ton of the game’s combat feels like it’s especially tweaked and balanced for him. I like Cloud. He’s got a good mixture of speed and power. His abilities are formidable, and he’s got one of the most intuitive blocks in the game. You really can’t go wrong using Cloud or having him in your party.

My main issue with Cloud is, really, that I like the next two characters on this list better, and as the game went on, I found myself switching to one of them. Cloud’s a lot of fun to play overall, and you can certainly do worse, though.

Yuffie Kisaragi

I had my doubts about Yuffie in FF7 Rebirth, but she quickly became one of my favorite characters to use in the game. A big part of that is her Elemental Ninjutsu makes her super useful for pretty much any situation. You can combine that with other abilities to then make her do a ton of damage and charge things up super fast. Plus, Yuffie can hit things on the ground, in the air, close-up, and at a distance. She’s genuinely pretty perfect from a utility standpoint.

Tifa Lockhart

Tifa was my favorite character in FF7 Remake, and I’m happy to say she retains the title in FF7 Rebirth. She’s fast, hits hard, and it’s extremely easy to charge her ATB gauges. Her only real drawback is that she’s not as good at hitting things in the air as other characters, but she can absolutely melt enemies on the ground. I also found her dodge to be the best of all the characters, and I often used her specifically to take down some of the toughest bosses in the game, because she was so maneuverable.

And that’s our ranked list of all the party members in FF7 Rebirth. If you’re looking for more, check out our guide on how to romance Tifa.

A remake of the 2004 Game Boy Advance game of the same name, Mario vs. Donkey Kong sees the titular plumber once again facing off against his original foe. This time around, Donkey Kong has stolen a bunch of toys from Mario’s Toy Company, and the hero is looking to get his likeness back. As such, he pursues the great ape across several different levels — generally divided into two parts — and puts him into conflict with a lot of classic Mario enemies. Each different world essentially has its own shtick that you’ve got to get used to in order to collect presents and retrieve the Mario toys before facing off against Donkey Kong.

Overall, Mario vs. Donkey Kong is a pretty short game, and that’s about the biggest black mark against it. You can pretty easily beat the title in five hours, and fully completing it doesn’t take much longer, especially once you start to get used to how the puzzles work. And luckily, the puzzles are pretty intuitive. It doesn’t take that long to figure out what the game is asking, and that keeps it from feeling like you’re ever really banging your head against a wall.

Related: All 2D Mario Games, Ranked From Worst to Best

That being said, while it lasts, Mario vs. Donkey Kong is an excellent time. The early levels are pretty easy overall, but the farther you get, the more difficult the puzzles start to become, and it’s really satisfying to get through a level. No level is really that hard, and after a few tries, you’re likely to finish just fine.

I really enjoyed, specifically, the levels that required you to lead the little Mario toys through various obstacles to collect the letters “TOY” and then get them back to their toy box. These were among the most challenging in the game, but the solutions felt interesting and intuitive.

Aesthetically, Mario vs. Donkey Kong also looks good. It doesn’t necessarily have the panache of Super Mario Bros Wonder, which was a trippy psychedelic experience I often found myself wanting to show to other people. However, the levels and character models look good. I don’t really have any complaint there, except that Mario Wonder just set the part pretty high for aesthetics in a Mario game, so the puzzler doesn’t feel special, even if it looks great.

Mario vs. Donkey Kong also has pretty simple, easy to remember controls that make it simple to play. I never found myself forgetting any of the moves I could do, and there’s an elegance to that sort of simple game design that I really appreciate.

At the end of the day, I wish I had more to say about Mario vs. Donkey Kong. It’s a really enjoyable puzzle-platformer, and it works well on the Nintendo Switch. Still, the game is so short that there’s not a lot to comment on overall. It’s well-made and worth your time if you love simple, clean puzzle games. I also imagine it’d be a great game for younger kids who are still working on their puzzle-solving skills. So if you’re looking for another game starring the beloved plumber to tide you over between releases, Mario vs. Donkey Kong is the game for you.

A review code was provided by the publisher.

Posted to Change.org, the petition is titled “Holding Monopoly GO Scopely accountable” and has earned more than 9,500 signatures as of this article’s most recent update. Although that’s smaller than a lot of petitions on the platform, that’s still quite a few signatures, as the campaign only launched on Feb. 13.

The campaign was started by Ana Velez and is in protest of a recent update to Monopoly GO. “Scopely has implemented a new update that appears to primarily serve their own interests.” The specific update to which Velez is referring is one in which dice rolls are predetermined in an attempt to curtail an exploit involving airplane mode that lets players to essentially reroll if they don’t like the result of a dice roll by enabling and disabling the function.

“This [change] ultimately benefits Scopely financially, as they have control over players’ tile landings,” the petition’s description continues. “Coupled with already challenging events designed to maximize profits, this update incentivizes players to spend significant amounts of money on dice, further benefiting Scopely.”

Velez went on to note that Scopely essentially billed the change as a bug fix and that the update “undermines the trust of players by revealing that the game is rigged against them.” The petition asks for the community to take a stand against the change and hints at the possibility of “legal action to protect the rights of players who have invested time and money into the game.”

Monopoly GO is a mobile game in which players use dice rolls to travel around various themed boards to collect money. They then use this money to buy Landmarks, and when enough are completed, they move on to the next board. There are a fair number of different events, tournaments, and challenges that crop up in the game. Overall, Monopoly GO has proven immensely popular, with the title reportedly earning more than a billion in less than a year.

If you’re looking for more on Monopoly GO, check out our list of free dice roll links for the game, which we update daily.

FF7 Rebirth’s Story Is an Incredible Retelling

The second installment in a trilogy retelling the events of 1997’s Final Fantasy 7, FF7 Rebirth follows Cloud Strife and his allies after their escape from Midgar. The team decides to follow a group of mysterious, zombie-like men in black robes that are tied to franchise antagonist Sephiroth, a legendary figure looking to destroy the world. This leads them across their world and into several major fights for the future of the planet.

FF7 Rebirth adapts a large chunk of the original Final Fantasy 7‘s first disc. When stretched out into a full game, it’s clear that section of Final Fantasy 7‘s plot is, from a high-level perspective, pretty simple. It’s basically a road trip story, and it’s a perfect example of the “Fun & Games” section of a story’s second act, in that it’s focused a lot on fleshing out the game’s characters and putting them in interesting situations that challenge them.

What works about that chunk of Final Fantasy 7 isn’t that there are a ton of twists and turns. Instead, it’s just how character-driven the story is. FF7 Rebirth features some of the best character work I’ve seen in a video game by taking what the original version did well and expanding on it. Rebirth cares a ton about its characters, and their dynamics with each other. It finds interesting ways to flesh them out, and by the end, I found myself more invested than ever before in Final Fantasy 7‘s vibrant, complex characters.

The dynamics between various team members are also worth focusing on. FF7 Rebirth has a relationship system that incentivizes Cloud to talk to and make friends with his companions. The game wants you to get to know them more. While there are a lot of games with strong characters — I’m thinking of something like the Mass Effect series here — FF7 Rebirth doesn’t make relationship building something that just happens when you camp for the night or retire to your ship to start harassing your friends in their rooms. It’s a constant process throughout the game, and it never feels like an afterthought.

At the same time, Rebirth smartly doesn’t just focus on Cloud’s relationship with his companions, but also how they interact with each other. Barret and Red XIII really stand out for me. Without going into too many spoilers, the two start off not being particularly friendly towards one another. After an experience together, though, Barret begins calling Red XIII by his real name: Nanaki.

That detail might not seem particularly major, but Red XIII was the test subject designation Shinra and the mad scientist Hojo gave to Nanaki. The name is a mark of how Shinra has abused him. There’s something really powerful about Barret rejecting the Red XIII designation in favor of Nanaki. It shows how intimate and close the characters have become, and the way they’ve bonded over their shared trauma.

And make no mistake: FF7 Rebirth is about trauma.

Pretty much every main character in FF7 Rebirth has experienced a profoundly traumatic event in their past. Shinra and Sephiroth are, generally speaking, the parties responsible for what’s happened. The way Rebirth emphasizes the real effects those two entities have had on its protagonists helps to make them feel like personal threats as well as existential threats to the Planet. That combination of stakes makes getting invested in the game and its characters so easy.

At the same time, Rebirth is also about how you react to trauma. Sephiroth and several other protagonists react to the tragedies in their pasts by attempting to lash out and hurt others. The protagonists of FF7 Rebirth, though, are on a journey in which they learn what it means to heal from what’s happened while still moving forward in a way that helps others. It’s a beautiful, complicated tale that doesn’t shy away from engaging with hard themes and ideas.

The biggest problem with Rebirth‘s story really boils down to the fact that it’s the second part of a trilogy. The Midgar section in Remake is, generally speaking, a bit more self-contained in terms of its internal arcs and plot points. However, Rebirth gets caught in the trap of having to set up what comes next, and that leads to a lot of plot points getting introduced in the game that, due to the constraints of the story, don’t actually get resolved or fleshed out as much as they could. It’s hard to blame Rebirth for that problem, as it’s an issue caused by turning one game into three. Plus, what is there is still excellent and enjoyable.

Rebirth Updates Remake’s Combat In Some Smart Ways That Don’t Always Work

If you’ve played Final Fantasy 7 Remake, you basically know how the gameplay works in Rebirth. You use a party of three characters to wail on enemies using comically big swords, gun arms, and magic. By attacking enemies in just the right way, you can “stagger” them, and thus do more damage. You’ve also got a lot of special moves, including Synergy Abilities, that you can use to really wreck your opponents.

There are a lot of really nice little refinements and quality of life improvements in Rebirth. The biggest is that, in Remake, having the wrong magic set up could easily lead to battles that really dragged on and one due to not having the right spell. Even worse, it was really easy to burn through all of your MP in Remake just dealing with regular enemies. Luckily, Rebirth gives Cloud and his allies different elemental abilities that they can use in lieu of magic and MP to stagger enemies. It’s a welcome addition that cleans up the battle system pretty elegantly.

One of the challenges for FF7 Rebirth was always going to be dealing with a bigger party. I’m happy to say that Square Enix did a pretty good job in that department. The game is relatively flexible in terms of team makeup, and there are a lot of segments that force you to get more used to characters you might have been using less. I really appreciated that, since it made me not just rely on who I knew how to use, and in the process, I discovered exactly who I liked to play most and why. Swapping Materia — the little orbs responsible for magic — can be a bit of a chore, but it’s not too bad.

However, not every change feels perfect to me. Rebirth is decidedly more action-oriented than Remake, which becomes more apparent in the later hours of the game. FF7 Rebirth really wants you to block and dodge enemy attacks by learning exactly how they work. That’s not necessarily bad, but it moves the focus from party set-up to twitch reactions. Not all of the existing systems that have been ported over from Remake really gel with the change. My allies, for example, felt decidedly more useless in Rebirth than they did in Remake. If I wasn’t in control of a character, they’d basically just block. Unless I was switching between characters with regularity, FF7 Rebirth often felt like I was doing one-on-one battles while my friends stood around and occasionally threw a punch.

The more action-oriented combat gets further complicated by the ATB gauge. By attacking and blocking enemy attacks, you gain the ability to use spells and items by expending your ATB gauge. The problem is that, because FF7 Rebirth is more action oriented, you can end up in situations where the early parts of battles really drag because you can’t actually hit your enemy, or you’re waiting for a specific attack to block. After awhile, it gets genuinely quite frustrating to deal with, and there are a lot of encounters that take longer than they should just because you’re waiting for something to happen. I actually beat FF7 Rebirth’s final boss in less time than a random monster I’d fought a few hours before due to the mechanics surrounding the two enemies.

Despite those gripes, I did generally enjoy the combat in FF7 Rebirth, and I think it’s an improvement over Remake in a lot of key ways. There were some genuinely great and memorable battles in Rebirth, and when the title’s various systems came together, fighting felt really good. However, on the occasions where they ground against each other, the game really felt like a slog.

Rebirth Has Too Many Mechanics & Mini-Games

Although the combat in FF7 Rebirth can be a bit of a double-edged blade, the game has a pretty glaring issue: There are too many random mechanics and mini-games.

Virtually every chapter of FF7 Rebirth introduces a new mechanic or mini-game. In a lot of cases, they only exist for a portion of a single chapter or side quest. From a design perspective, I understand what Square Enix was going for. They’re there to not make the game feel too monotonous, because just moving between cutscenes and combat can get really stale. Those additions are meant to keep the game interesting. The problem is, they’re rarely interesting in Rebirth.

FF7 Rebirth has at least a dozen mini-games (I stopped counting relatively early into the process), and they range from totally fine (Queen’s Blood is a nice little card game that’s basically a budget version of Final Fantasy 8‘s Triple Triad) to “did Sephiroth design this mini-game in an attempt to get me to stop playing?” None of the mini-games really stood out to me as good, and they often felt like filler. Most only have one or two levels, and I cleared them at the highest level within two tries. Mini-games should be fun, but everything I encountered in Rebirth felt like an obligation that the game was forcing me to meet.

Rebirth also loves adding new mechanics for traversing the map, even if they’re not that interesting. In the cases of individual characters, those mechanics can sometimes be neat but relatively forgettable. The open world, though, is often a bit of a mess. Each new region of FF7 Rebirth introduces a new twist, and while they’re fine in the early game, they’re a lot more frustrating and tedious later in the game. I don’t want to struggle to get to something because I couldn’t find the right jumping off point on my map. I want to struggle with something because I’m bad at it. Navigation became a massive chore in the mid- to late-game, and I found that although I really liked the variety and vibe of every region, I didn’t much like traversing them.

Also, FF7 Rebirth has stealth segments. Technically, some of them could be considered optional, but in practicality, they’re mandatory, since they’re the main way you get chocobos in a region. They’re genuinely quite frustrating, and if I could have skipped them, I would have. They weren’t so much challenging as — to use the biggest keyword of this section of my review — tedious.

The problem with Rebirth‘s mechanics is most apparent in side quests, though. There’s one that really sticks with me. Towards the middle of the game, I was tasked with getting chickens to return to a coop using a lure box. You find the chicken and throw the box. The chicken starts walking up to the box, and you have to pull it back. Sometimes, the chicken gets distracted, and you have to wait. If you move too far or too fast, the chicken stops following. It’s unbelievably tedious.

Just pick the chicken up, Cloud. I am begging you to please just pick the chicken up.

If it were just Cloud refusing to pick up a chicken, I don’t think I’d be as hard on FF7 Rebirth. However, the problem of the title having too many mini-games and adding too many mechanics messes up the pacing in a way that made it really hard for me to click with Rebirth‘s gameplay overall. The game kept steering me away from combat and towards annoying mechanics and mini-games that made it tough to really settle into a flow.

The Part of the Review You’ll Skip To

My feelings on FF7 Rebirth are mixed. Overall, I’ve played the game for more than eighty hours. That’s a pretty glowing statement in and of itself. I’ve liked a lot of what I’ve played. The writing is wonderful, and despite a few quibbles, the combat is enjoyable. However, as the game went on, frustrating, tedious mechanics and mini-games detracted from the experience in a big way. FF7 Rebirth is the middle entry in the Remake Trilogy, and it feels like a middle entry. It pushes Remake forward in some ways that are genuinely admirable, but a lack of refinement and attention to detail keeps it from being one of the best games ever.

A PlayStation 5 review code was provided by the publisher for this review. FF7 Rebirth is available to pre-order now.

According to Deadline, Thunderbolts will now release on May 2, 2025, with Fantastic Four to follow on July 25, 2025.

The news comes following on the heels of the company announcing the cast for the latter film. Pedro Pascal will play Reed Richards, AKA Mister Fantastic, with Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm, AKA The Invisible Woman. Joseph Quinn will play Johnny Storm, AKA Human Torch, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach will play Ben Grimm, AKA The Thing. All of them will be debuting as their characters in Fantastic Four, at least as far as we know right now.

The Thunderbolts film will feature several characters who have already appeared in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Those include Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes, AKA Winter Soldier, Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova, Wyatt Russell as John Walker, AKA U.S. Agent, Olga Kurylenko as Taskmaster, David Harbour as Alexei Shostakov, AKA Red Guardian, Hannah John-Kamen as Ava Starr, AKA Ghost, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine.

Currently, Lewis Pullman is set to play Robert Reynolds, AKA Sentry, having taken the role over from Steven Yeun.

After a busy couple of years, the MCU’s release schedule is notably slowing down in 2024. At present, only Deadpool & Wolverine is set to hit the big-screens. That movie is slated for July 26, 2024, with the next installment in the cinematic universe, Captain America: Brave New World, not coming out until February 14, 2025.

There are a lot of theories surrounding Deadpool & Wolverine, especially following the release of the first trailer. Right now, the big question has been just how the MCU will pull in the Fantastic Four and X-Men, the rights to whom they acquired following Disney’s merger with Fox, and it seems entirely possible that the Merc With a Mouth will be the conduit for that.

All Patch Notes for Palworld Update 0.1.3.0 on Steam

Overall, there aren’t a ton of changes that were made to the 0.1.3.0 version of Palworld in the update. Mostly, the fixes focused on correcting small problems and taking action against cheaters. Here’s a list of them, as posted on Steam, below.

Main changes
・Fixed a bug where the loading screen did not end when logging into the world
・Fixed a bug where the world date was not displayed correctly and appeared to reset.
・Corrected various incorrect text
・Countermeasures against various cheats and exploits

It’s worth noting that the Steam version of Palworld is still different from the one on Game Pass. While this update brings Steam to version 0.1.3.0, the Game Pass update only brought it up to 0.0.47075.0. Developer Pocketpair addressed the discrepancy between the two versions saying that it came down to issues with the certification process.

Overall, it’s not a surprise that Palworld dropped a new update and patch so soon. The game has become a smash-hit and is easily one of the biggest titles in recent memory. That being said, the so-called Pokémon with Guns game hasn’t been without its controversy, with some accusing the developers of plagiarism and Nintendo recently saying they were looking into the title.

Considering the massive success of Palworld, I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up getting another update sooner rather than later, and I’m really hoping that the Game Pass version eventually works with the Steam so that I can do some crossplay.

You can watch the footage, which was posted on YouTube, below for a look at the highly anticipated game. During the Developer Direct, it was revealed that Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 will release on May 21.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen footage from Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2. A look at the game was revealed in 2021 at The Game Awards. More recently, in June, the Xbox Games Showcase provided at gameplay for Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, which featured a lot of nightmarish imagery.

The original Hellblade released in 2017 on PlayStation 4 and PC. Set in Iceland, the game sees players taking on the role of Senua, a warrior on a quest to save her dead lover’s soul from Hela. Overall, the game was well-received, and its various versions are in the 80s on Metacritic. Reviewers also specifically noted the game’s depiction of psychosis as being noteworthy and interesting. Hellblade was nominated for several major awards, including Game of the Year, by several outlets. Basically, it was a big deal.

The developer direct featuring Ninja Theory revealed a lot about Senua’s journey, including her changing relationship with her psychosis. She’ll also find herself up against new and deadly threats, which she’ll take on in a new combat system. The developers behind the game have also noted that, in order to capture the essence of Iceland, they explored the country and created audio recordings while there. Overall, audio is a big focus of the game, and Ninja Theory is teaming up with Scandinavian folk music band Heilung on the game.

Developed by Ninja Theory and published by Xbox Game Studios, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 is slated to release on May 21, 2024. At this time, there’s no indication that the title will make its way to PlayStation consoles.