Intro
From Final Fantasy Tactics and Dragon Quest VII to Street Fighter 6 and Overwatch, here’s what the Selective Hearing team played in February.
Allen
What Have You Been Playing in February?
- Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles
- Dragon Quest VII Reimagined
What Are Your Thoughts?
SPOILERS AHEAD
Final Fantasy Tactics: Ivalice Chronicles has been a dream to play. This last month was filled with powering through the story. I felt like I was spending a lot of time levelling up my jobs on my character, which got a bit too powerful early. There are just so many quality-of-life improvements that make the game much more enjoyable and less grindy. For example, skipping any random fights while walking around on the map has been a godsend. Knocking out errands just became trivial. It’s still cool seeing little callbacks to other FF games like this.
I did stick to my main group of five, including Ramza. As much as I would have liked to use the other side characters, it always felt like once they joined, they didn’t really have anything else to add to the story, with the small exception of Mustadio and the big side quest. The last battle did challenge my team. I originally thought I was just going to have five ninjas and just power through the game, but I ended up fleshing out almost all the jobs. I never liked dragoons in the original, but I had one that ended up being my strongest fighter. Never used dancers in the original, had my main white mage dancing all over the place when she wasn’t healing. It felt great to flex around my team and change jobs without having to think too much about any mistakes. If I had set up the team wrong, the game lets you go back and reset the fight right away.
I found the one big side quest and the extra dungeon, Midnight’s Deep, to be pretty difficult at first. I needed a few resets and a few tries to get them done. I also needed a map to get through Midnight’s Deep. The last trophy I had to collect was the Master of All Trades trophy. I just went to Mandalia Plains to farm job points. Ended up turning one mob into a toad, surrounding it with all my troops, and then using focus to spam job points to learn all the skills I needed. That was a real grind, mainly because it was a bit easy and kind of boring at times, but it got the job done.
I feel that Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is the best way to play Final Fantasy Tactics. Everything is enhanced, from the quality-of-life improvements to the graphics and even the story, with the addition of voice acting. It was a pleasure to play this game again.
Another Square Enix game, Dragon Quest VII Reimagined, has finally been released. I originally thought about skipping this and putting it near the end of my 2026 queue. However, I ended up playing the demo and liking it a lot. The speed-up options helped swing things my way; in fact, I felt like the fastest option was way too fast.
I also wasn’t too hot on the art style at first, but after a few fights and seeing the characters and enemies in the puppet style and the towns as giant dioramas, I ended up liking it a lot. Long-time DQ fans can see how true the style is to the original art. Even the NPCs look great, too.
I haven’t unlocked any of the job options just yet, but there are many to choose from, based on what I have read. Plus, it also seems very flexible with the moonlighting option, basically giving you two jobs to work with. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of party makeups I can create among my teammates.
What Are You Looking Forward to in March?
It’ll be tough to find more game time to play with a lot of work taking over. Resident Evil Requiem will probably be my highest priority once I finish Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined. Ghost of Yotei Legends looks awesome, so hopefully the guys will want to team up and get some game time in.
Greg
What Have You Been Playing in February?
- Street Fighter 6
- WWE 2K25
What Are Your Thoughts?
Street Fighter 6
Well, I guess I’m trying to “get good” as the FGC nerds like to say, as I have managed to get my boy Sagat to Gold 4. This is basically my highest rank in any fighting game ever.
Ranked is usually something I don’t care to grind since it’s generally a pretty toxic world of people doing the cheapest shit possible to level up. But I am determined to see how far I can push my gameplay so I don’t have to deal with so many cheap people anymore. And I’m starting to get the calibre of player who genuinely kind of wants to play a serious match rather than go unga bunga.
I’m actually enjoying casual matches a lot more, especially when I get matched with higher-level players (mostly platinum and diamond players for me). I get to test all the stuff I’ve been learning in a stress-free environment, and sometimes I win. It’s a bit of a temporary ego booster until I get bodied and reality comes crashing into me.
What I have learned in the past month is to stop pressing buttons. Watching my replays, I can see I get caught hitting a button at the wrong time, and I get destroyed after. It’s that, and do more standing blocks. Crouch block is my default when defending, and it’s biting me in the ass. But another month of serious play in, and I can see the small improvements in my game to where I can keep up with higher-level players. So I would say that is a good milestone to hit.
WWE 2K25
I only had a short time with this game before it became unavailable to me because it was moved to PlayStation Plus Platinum members only. I haven’t played any of the modern 2K WWE games, so there was a bit of a learning curve. But it didn’t take long to get the hang of the basics and try out some matches. I had fun just messing around and figuring out how to get a five-star match between lower and mid-card wrestlers.
What Are You Looking Forward to in March?
As usual, I have nothing particularly exciting loaded up in my new game queue. I haven’t been looking at what is coming up in the first quarter of 2026. But I’ll see what backlog games I want to finish instead. Maybe I will buy WWE 2K26 if I have nothing else to play in my backlog.
BigFreaky
What Have You Been Playing in February?
- Overwatch
What Are Your Thoughts?
Overwatch
Over…WHAT?
Much to my surprise Overwatch2 had a HUGE update to its entire existence. Starting off, they dropped the 2 from the name, and we now return to just simply Overwatch. I have not really been in the scene about this game for quite a long time after feeling a bit burned out, and a bit burned overall…
By the looks of it, the Overwatch(2) team had a bit of fire set to their butts by the emergence of Marvel Rivals to the scene. NetEase reenergized the hero shooter genre.
Marvel Rivals stole the spotlight, and a lot of players from OW(2) were forced to work on getting the game back to its glory and reinvigorating the playerbase that had been patiently waiting, or simply just jumped ship.
As mentioned above, dropping the 2 was a huge move that helped solidify the game’s forward momentum. Another major announcement was the addition of 5 new heroes immediately, with 5 more to be released this year under a brand-new season structure. As well as a year-long storyline including shorts, comics and in-game cosmetics.
It seems I haven’t really played the game in almost 2 years. So a few days before the new drop, I hopped on to see if my muscle memory was still there, and to see what I’ve even missed before we received all the new heroes.
I was not alone. The player stats were incredible after the information was dropped. Many others had the same idea to get into the game, catch up, and prepare for the new content.
On “relaunch” day it felt like Christmas all over again. A freshness of Overwatch again, but also a bit of frustration trying to learn new character interaction while deep in battle. The feeling of familiarity is always so strong when you are getting stomped, and many (myself included) swap back to old faces. Everything was all over the place, and that is ok.
I played a good amount of hours after the new drops, and I hope to play some more going forward. The game is ‘try hard’ as always, and I don’t think that will ever change. I do find the story pretty engaging, and OW2 really strayed from that quite a bit. I think that hook is important for a lot of “casual” players as well. So I’ll be keeping up as much as possible.
But… there are a few other big games coming up soon to distract me from one of my oldest relationships.
What Are You Looking Forward to in March?
Pokopia is coming!! March 5th!
OF COURSE!! Ghost of Yotei: Legends is coming now!! March 10!! Just 5 days after Pokopia… I have to re-up my PSPlus… I haven’t had it for a while.
The forever backlog
Playing pre-switch Pokémon games
