FF 16 beaten:

I completed all the side quests and monster hunts in the game, got the max renown reward, forged Gotterdammerung and the Oroborus armor pieces, and beat Ultima.  The second half of the game, which had epic fights with Bahamut and Odin, and a well-earned romance with Jill, was better than the first half.  The game was better than nothing, I'll admit that much.

Still, it had so many problems.  The music was mediocre at best.  The translation was deliberately garbled, to such an extent that it was basically useless.  The only way to know what the people were actually saying, the original script that was made in Japan in Japanese, is to understand Japanese voices and translate it all yourself.  Which I basically did, but God help anyone other than me playing this game.  None of the characters really impressed me, as usual they forced a gay kiss down my throat, the gameplay was pretty awful until I got six eikon abilities, after which I could stop endlessly pressing square as my only attack and actually start fighting strategically, and every emotional scene where people were dying (everybody dies in this game, it's the darkest game ever made) failed to touch me in the least.  I just kept thinking, 'yeah yeah get over it nobody cares.'

The graphics were good, the gameplay was fun in the second half of the game, and the hideaway was a cool mechanic, like the Fire Emblem Three Houses Monastery, where I could handle all the non-combat stuff in one place.  There were some fun challenging monster hunts that took me hours to beat (Atlas and Svarog), but generally the difficulty was kept to a reasonable level that let me quickly proceed through the plot, which is nice.  Clive is really handsome and Jill is pretty, especially when they showed her off nude, a Final Fantasy first.  I guess that's all the good parts of the game.

I said I'd beat this game and after four months of owning it I have.  Not bad, all said.  Now I need to get back to the games I haven't beaten and have owned for a lot longer than four months -- FF7 Yuffie Intermission, FF7 Crisis Core and 13 Sentinels Aegis Rim.  With luck I can beat all three before FF7 Rebirth comes out.

Meanwhile my top anime rankings returned to 10,000 must-see episodes on the dot as promised thanks to the latest episode of Bleach.  It's nice seeing this cool milestone multiple times, though a little weird.