All the way back in 2010, me and my brother were gifted a Wii during our first week of school that Fall. I had just started the 5th grade and a week or two prior I had rented and played a chunk of Super Mario Galaxy 2 on my dad's friend's Wii during a beach trip. I absolutely loved what I played of it but after the trip was over, I had to return the game back to the rental store and of course the Wii was not mine, so I craved more. Like I said, my dad gifted us a Wii and with it was Super Mario Galaxy. My brother got the Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs game so it's pretty clear only one of us got a quality title. I was infactuated with this game. I can still remember running home from school, going right to my Wii as I couldn't wait to play it any longer. I'd wake up super early on weekends too just to play more. This and Galaxy 2 were basically the first non-licensed game's I truly loved and I'm very thankful for that as it made me want to play more Nintendo titles afterwards. As you can see I adore this game, let's talk about why!

I think the defining factor as to why people love this game so much (besides the story) is its atmosphere and portrayal of space. Sure, you have more goofy or lighthearted galaxies like Honeyhive or Beach Bowl that wouldn't feel out of place in another game. But a good chunk of the galaxies in this game, as well as the Comet Observatory, just have this really unique emptyness or marvel that really makes you feel like you're in space. Take Space Junk Galaxy for example. It's a very serene and solemn galaxy where most of the setting is literal space with some junk spread throughout just like the name implies and it's very relaxing to go through. A lot of the time I would just go into first person and marvel at the scope of all the planets or just look at the different skyboxes each galaxy has. Even on this playthrough, when I've played this game countless times, I still did this..it just never gets old to me.

As I said, the story is probably the other aspect people love about this game the most. It's still a Mario game so don't expect something mind-blowing but the cutscenes that are here are all great. Be it the beginning cutscene where Mario gets shot at by a magikoopa and gets flung to the starting planet while Peach screams his name, to the ending cutscene where all the Luma's save the entire universe by sacrificing themselves. It's just all so well done. Granted, these cutscenes only really happen at the beginning and end of the game, but it's what's contained in them that matters and it's the single best story in any mainline Mario game hands down. That's not even getting into the optional Rosalina's storybook which is in itself the single best part of the story. It just adds that extra depth to her character and let's you see who she is and how she got there. And even replaying it now, I still teared up...it's that good.

The OST I also think is the single best soundtrack in any Mario game. It has it all, it has catchy songs, it has majestic songs, it has atmospheric songs, it has emotional songs. I love Galaxy 2's OST too but it doesn't top 1 in my opinion and I think that's specifically because 2 doesn't have those emotional/sad songs which I value a bunch nowadays. Those would be A Wish, Sad Girl, and Family. Those last two especially, goddamn dude, I always can't help but get emotional when I hear them. Some other more lighthearted songs I love are Gusty Garden obviously, Melty Molten Galaxy, Buoy Base Galaxy and The Comet Observatory. All in all, an absolutely fantastic soundtrack.

As for the galaxies themselves...they're good! There may be some I'm not the biggest fan of, mostly the beach/bee galaxies and that's mostly because they reuse that theme twice which kinda stinks. But in general the galaxies are quite good even if they're aren't a ton of main one's. In that regard, 2 still does it better because there's way more fun and varied galaxies in that one, but 1 still has some really great levels to play around in. My favorites were Gusty Garden, Buoy Base, Freezeflame, Melty Molten and Space Junk. Special mention to Toy Time too for being so wacky and fun. Though, honestly another small critique I have with the game is the prankster comets. I'm fine with the purple coin ones but for the ones you playthrough your first time through before Bowser, there only being 4 types is kinda lame. 2 fixed this somewhat by adding more types and making it less obvious what it's gonna be but I felt it was worth pointing out. I will also say, people saying the movement in this game sucks I will never get. Is it better than Odyssey's? Definitely not but I still think it's a ton of fun to play around with the gravity. That's just me at least.

So yeah, I know I gave a criticism or two but I still absolutely adore this game and 2 fixes those issues I have and I sort of group them together as one game so it balances each others faults out. It and Galaxy 2 are basically my favorite games ever and I go back and forth on which one I prefer regularly for different reasons so I usually group them together even if both give pretty different gaming experiences. Either way, this game means everything to me and it's a must play for every gamer I think. I love it so much. Anyways, figured I'd go and replay 2 while I'm at it so look for that review soon!

Also forgot to say, I played as Luigi this time around. He's fun to play as even if he is slippery cuz his jumps are much larger. The reward you get for 100%ing both Mario and Luigi is lame as hell though and definitely was improved in 2.

Even though it's more than 10 years old now, Monument Valley is still very enjoyable to play, and which global tone, artistic direction and music hasn't aged a bit. The game is quite short, but each level stands on its own and they're all very well crafted. That being said, if you quickly accept those forced perspective mechanics, the puzzles will go by pretty fast and the cerebral challenge stays light. It's without saying that the authors took inspiration from FEZ when making this title, but it's way easier and less deep than the game from Polytron.

In any case, Monument Valley stays and excellent puzzle game and it will poke at your cortex just the right amount, while still being pleasing to your eyes and ears.

8/10.

This is just BotW with balancing issues, aimless mechanics that weren't really thought out, and a half-hearted attempt to actually address anything people asked for. I loved botw, I just wrote a review of it and wind waker to go into how well the series has tackled being a true open world before this. But THIS is pretty unacceptable. I was already not thrilled with it being a direct sequel taking place in the same world map, but getting into the meat of it and finding out almost nothing I liked from botw actually made it over, almost nothing I asked for to improve on botw was even attempted, AND it ate up 6 years of dev time with almost nothing to show?! Giving the benefit of the doubt, there's no way this would have taken 6 years to make without Covid time. I refuse to believe this glorified expansion had 6 years of dedicated development. Majora's mask, Wind Waker, and Twilight Princess all came out within a 6 year span of each other and Nintendo's telling me they spent a whole year polishing some half baked vehicle creator?

I've had a very aggressive roller coaster of an experience with this game. It just does not lead you around naturally even a fraction as well as botw did. Trying to play this like I did the first, I turned off quest markers and just roamed around. This was an almost entirely miserable experience that really killed my desire to keep playing. Massive landscapes that were a joy to explore in botw now felt tired and lifeless. Not helping is that there's no guardians in this game so any area that they guarded is now literally empty. The giant towers now very rarely hold any meaningful content around them, or on the way to them, ignoring one of the most important design decisions that made botw actually fun to play. At most now you'll trudge up to one and do some meager quest to get the door open. And like, maybe one or two of them was actually vaguely interesting. They added caves to the game which was exciting at first until you remember the game's sticking to the botw formla really firmly to the point of copying its entire game structure. Meaning you're not going to get ANY meaningful rewards for exploring the caves aside from very rarely, outfit pieces (which are just outfits copy pasted from the first game, there's a LOT of copy paste content here) And doing the shrines just felt exhausting. I really think the game could have been a LOT better and stood on its own as a proper sequel if they just ditched the shrines alltogether. It feels like they're only there because "oh well...we gotta put one near every single stable and town and around every corner too so you can have adequate fast travel points" So it quickly feels like they're not making shrines because they want to, they're doing it because botw needed them. Not even thinking that this game didn't strictly need to be limited to what botw needed. The zelda formula needed botw to begin with because by skyward sword, they had been accumulating design flaws that kept getting bigger and bigger and they just kept doing them out of tradition. Well here they are 2 games into this new style and they're already bending over backwards to stick to the formula even if it hurts the game dramatically. They made the same mistake here. Except it's worse because now because we have to trudge through the entirety of the previous game just to find the nuggets of content they made specifically for this game that don't just feel derivative and/or lazy.

The open ended exploration was a flop so I turned on quest markers and followed the questlines. And when I did this, I started enjoying it a bit more. And I started to think I understood the game. After all I wouldn't mind at all if this one was more about the main quest, the first game excelled at open world exploration that doesn't mean this one needs to do the same thing. Did the water temple and the desert temple. Especially the Gerudo's segment felt substantial and even featured new enemies (a genuine rarity for this game) I even started heading towards all the story tears the game was named after. Some of it was fairly dry but it was great to see Ganondorf, he's a lot of fun. And I just happened to experience the story in the exact right set of circumstances to make certain story revelations SUPER cool and very memorable. I'm not sure everyone will have the same experience though. You can do all of it in any order, I just happened to get lucky to have stumbled across each of its individual pieces in an order that felt impactful. I can see a number of ways certain aspects wouldn't be quite as strong if you did things in a different order. And it's not like the game gives you so much as a nudge in the order it wants you to do things in. But, I had a good time with the story that was presented to me. Where the story falters is in the main quest tied to the 4 dungeons.

Very quickly you realize the moment your companion reaches the dungeon you're in for copy paste cutscenes across all 4 both in the beginning and end of their dungeons. In botw the drive to do all 4 dungeons was very well communicated. You're activating these giant mechs to give you the upper hand against Ganon. The story was very clearly all about EVERYTHING you do in botw being about building up to getting strong enough to take on the final boss. And it was very natural to go to the ending once you do get all 4 divine beasts. In TotK though you do them all and just turn in the quest at the NPC who told you to do it and it just completes like a normal quest in any mmo. They basically just go "cool thanks for doing that, great research, still not sure what's going on exactly". Then you get baited into going into hyrule castle, are locked into a room where you fight 3 bokoblins...and then nothing. You're just supposed to go finish the game now. No build up or real prompting or story reason. Literally just "botw's finale took place in the middle of the map and we know you played botw so whenever you're done with the game just go to the middle of the map and do the final boss" Hyrule castle in botw is one of my favorite moments in the series but in this game the ending dungeon is just a linear cave system where you effortlessly run past a bunch of enemies for a few minutes.

So yeah like, some of the dungeons were alright. It was nice to see that they put more effort into the theming. Especially the boss fights were nice as they're all original monsters instead of all being the same thing in botw. But functionally the temples are just lame versions of the divine beasts. Every single one is just about finding and activating the 5 objects to trigger the boss into spawning. But now you're not on a huge mech who's pieces you have control of, you're in THE smallest dungeons the series has ever seen, largely solving 3-4 totally isolated puzzles to beat them. Not helping is that they mark on your map where each thing you need to activate is so it's not really possible to be that challenged. The gerudo one was the best one, feeling the most like a traditional Zelda dungeon. Goron's kinda sucked, it was literally just attaching a fan to a mine cart then putting it on a rail over and over again which is what you did already outside of the dungeon. And its boss fell back on OOT boss design of use new item on boss, attack eye, slay in about a minute The other two temples were pretty samey, being all about floating islands. This is because one is the air temple and the other is water. And since they couldn't exactly do anything with water given botw didn't have any meaningful water mechanics like the older games did... and TotK isn't about to try to add anything substantial to the formula...just ignoring the problem was their solution.

Following the main quest and optional storyline sort of won me back over but sort of fell flat by the end anyway. And worst of all it really just feels like you're rushing through the game playing this way. Each of the 4 dungeons are beaten so quickly and it makes me feel like I'm not engaging with most of what new the game has to offer outside of sticking horns on my swords to have higher attack damage.

Leading to the actually new additions. Gluing anything you want onto your weapons is cool conceptually. But it ultimately doesn't add a whole lot. One of the biggest things they added...Strapping a rock to your sword to be able to mine things you were already mining in the first game without it. Or strapping the same enemy drops onto every single weapon throughout the entire game because it's the only thing that makes sense to do most of the time. For such a seemingly huge addition there's not much room to explore with it...The major issue is this system makes your damage output WAY higher than in botw. As a bandaid fix they spawn higher tiered bokoblins WAY earlier than botw would have. Leading to you trudging through 50 shrines just to have enough health to survive any basic encounter for one. But also enemies are damage sponges unless you attach one of their damage buffing drops onto your weapons. I'm not gonna pretend this system where I can attach literally any object to my sword is that interesting when my options are "gee do I attach a leaf, an acorn, a wooden box, another rusty sword with +3 attack damage, or a spike that triples my damage output?" It's pretty novel attaching a super long sword or spear with the same super long sword/spear. Got that sephiroth reach. Arrows and shields don't fare much better. For example with arrows you now just clunkily manually add the item onto it every single time you want to use a fire arrow. Whereas in the original you could just select fire arrow and throw them out one after another seamlessly. Heck you could do this in Ocarina of Time. Different arrow types aren't new for this series, being able to get a homing arrow for the one flying enemy in the game by putting a bat eye on the tip isn't worth making the entire system cumbersome. There's some cool things you can put on your shield but most of the time they break obnoxiously fast. Never hated the durability system but the way it interacts with a lot of the fusable objects is lame. And it still feels stupid to be rewarded with weapons in any circumstance. It's almost worse now because durability is naturally raised through fusion but now my inventory is full 100% of the time as a result. Almost like the original system WAS actually thought out despite it being divisive. Also taking out small monster parts to fuse from your menu is extremely clunky and poorly implemented and overall just not really worth bothering with. Otherwise it's pretty superfluous and only forces the devs to throw in more damage sponge enemies than ever.

Enemies being stronger variants early on just ends up being annoying. Especially considering they made unlocking the great fairies into a much bigger ordeal and grind (for the exact same upgrades as in botw) Speaks to this game's design philosophy shift. In botw you simply spent rupees to access the Great Fairies. This meant every single thing you do naturally lead to you unlocking the fairies considering all of your materials are worth money. Works real well in an open world setting all about freedom and avoiding player restriction. But here in the sequel you need to follow a linear set of the same side quest over and over again. And you better hope you find the start of the quest first before finding 3 other fairies and no way to save them. And that's where the shifts with this game over the original are. It's taking botw's freedom first focus, and stitching low quality open world fare content on top of it to justify its own existence as a new game.

Enemy variety improvements were something I was desperately asking for if nothing else. But with the removal of guardians...it's almost worse than in botw. There's three new overworld mini bosses, one for each of the 3 tiers of map (chasm, surface, and sky) the rest are the same rock monsters and giant cyclopses from botw. Normal enemy types well there's the new robots that are pretty lifeless and functionally just bokoblins that can use your own combine ability on their weapons. Some flying dudes that they kept showing in trailers that die to one shot of literally anything (even just shield bumping them kills them) I explored the underground chasm for give or take 30 hours and found 0 new enemies aside from some tiny frog things that also die in 1-2 hits and aren't threats at all. The returning redeads can't actually be fought and don't really do much of anything. They don't scream and stun you like before. You literally just use lightning or fire on them and they're as good as dead. Like-likes are back but they're stagnant enemies who are attached to walls and ceilings. They're ignorable most of the time, if you wanna fight them you just wait for them to spit out their glowing weak point and smack it, they're then stunned and you can usually kill them in 1 cycle. There's a new fat bokoblin that doesn't add much. And to round out this incredibly lame list of new enemies we got some new cave-monsters that try to poke you with long sticks on cave ceilings. Unless it's a white one they don't really survive for more than 2-3 sword swings too and they're generally easily ignorable.

Whenever you say this game didn't have enough content to warrant even existing people go But the chasms and the sky islands! They basically added two entire new worlds to explore But the underworld chasms are straight up 99% empty. So unthreatening and unengaging that you don't even need to light it up. Seriously you can just hold forward towards the next light-root and a majority of the time you won't be stopped. I only ever lit up the areas between light roots when I needed to see how high a cliff was to plan a climb. Otherwise it's empty ground. Then what's down here exactly? A lot of the exact same enemy camps you see above ground. A few pitifully easy Yiga clan boss fights. A miniboss that can be stunlocked by throwing bombs into its mouth like king dodongo...I WAS hyped to find an NPC asking for Poe souls and rushed down into a chasm, excited to see Poes come back. Only to find they've been reduced to being tiny flames you collect like normal items, scattered aimlessly everywhere by the hundreds. All you do with them is turn them in for dark link outfit pieces from the first game, and then an outfit that makes the gloom even easier to ignore than it already was. They also hide a lot of the amiibo outfits and botw's dlc costumes down here. Which is kind of nice but means nothing to me as someone who has the amiibo and played botw's dlc already...And even if I didn't, they're just costumes, many of which you can't upgrade. Or worse, weapons that'll break 3 minutes later.
I was anticipating a surprise twist where you find out there's another 4 dungeons in the chasms or something as I felt like the underground area was completely disconnected from the rest of the game. That and the 4 dungeons weren't substantial enough to be "IT" both in story and content. Then there's the sky which is not substantial at all. There's a handful of really samey islands with the same minecraft lookin' boss on many of them. The starting tutorial island is the biggest sky island if I'm not mistaken, they're all downhill from there and that's about all I can say about them aside from there was a decent diving minigame on a few. (And the tutorial island sucks beans compared to the great plateau)

Idk sorry this is such a long review but I just don't quite get this game. The chasms are straight up empty, the sky is not substantial, the surface world itself feels disposable now that you're so easily able to fly over it. (And not flying over it is slow and miserable in a way that botw wasn't) What's there to like about this game? And to top it all off this game copy pastes botw's soundtrack. A few of the new boss themes were awesome but really? The same exact piano bits in the open world? This is where the game really had an opportunity to stand out and be something new. Give some new stylistic flair and personality. Botw's ost was minimalistic because it was all about the literal breath of the wild. But this game isn't about that, yet you still have to suffer through it and now it's for no reason this time. The building mechanic feels like it's just there for viral marketting and the occasional vaguely interesting shrine puzzle. The upgraded battery is weirdly easy to miss, and I thought it was attached to a mission in the chasms so I didn't actually even upgrade my battery til super late into the game. Frankly idk what I'd have done even if I did fully engage with the building beyond do some korok missions a bit faster. It feels like such an afterthought that has very little actual focus. Like cool people are able to make comically impractical machines for funny twitter videos, otherwise it's not something that I feel the game even knows what to do with. Like...it's vaguely interesting to make your own vehicles but we already experienced driving a motorcycle across this world in botw's dlc so even that's not exactly novel. I'm sure some people are going to get a lot out of it, and I have no doubt I could have gotten at least a bit more out of the system beyond some basic shrine puzzles. But it's not really something you have to engage with much at all for the 4 main story quests, and past that there's not a whole lot to do beyond visiting a bunch of shrines and finish the game. For such a major mechanic like this it's weirdly not-present for so much of the game. It's even extremely easy to miss major upgrades to it that make it a lot more usable. Most I got out of it was a mission they have you do 85 times where you make a structure to help this guy's sign stay up. That and escorting koroks were all I did for the first 10 hours of this game and it was mind numbing. 60 hours in I've got the entire map filled out on the surface, about 80% filled out in the chasms, every sky island I could reach, done. Hundreds of koroks found. I still felt like I had done nothing outside of the 4 incredibly small dungeons, a bunch of unmemorable shrines, and some shallow side quests with poor rewards. 60 hours in I found 3 actually new clothing sets and like 12 sets copy pasted from the first game. I found that the game still just spams bokoblins and lizards at you and they added no truly substantial new enemies. One npc said their hometown was invaded by pirates and I was excited at the prospect but was disappointed to find it was just a bunch of bokoblins on a beach and a stagnant ship I had to slay to get nothing of value in return. Was absolutely floored and crushed when I got to the end of the game and they just spammed an insane amount of bokoblins, lizards, and moblins at me before the actual boss fight (which was an ok fight tho I beat it pretty easily without even being very prepared) Like wow, 6 years of dev time and boatloads of reused content and they just resort to spamming a bunch of the exact same enemies from the first game during the finale. I was pretty hyped to see the first korok escort mission as seeing a korok be a physics object was charming and fun the first time. I was intrigued to see what missions they'd have you do for seeds this time. Only to find out that's literally the only mission they made for koroks and almost all the rest were identical to the original game's. Hope you like getting a korok from A to B a hundred times. (Ok there's one other one that's just putting a rocket on a cork every single time you got me)

Also no details but somewhat of a spoiler, the ending undoes the most interesting and cool thing that actually happens in the story. They couldn't stomach having any meaningful stakes or consequences. And Ganondorf, the funnest part of the story otherwise, has almost no screen time.

Should have been such an easy hit. Just remove shrines and hide health and stamina upgrades in the caves. Boom HUGE part of the game becomes meaningful and you remove literal tens of hours worth of needless bloat. This alone would make the game fun and stand out on its own from botw. I have so much negative to say but this core design change would change so much. Because as it is, you have no legitimate reason to explore this map. "But you need shrines to fast travel" people say like there's any reason they can't just let you fast travel to towns you've already been to and let you place more of your own fast travel points. They could have done anything they wanted to make it work. Make more original music that plays in each section of the map, have more than 4 completely disconnected and tiny questlines and dungeons holding together your game you're meant to spend a hundred hours playing. And maybe don't spend literal years of development on a mechanic that ultimately adds very little to the game beyond mobility that's often not even more convenient than just riding your horse.

My hero's path in botw showed the ENTIRE map covered from head to toe. In this game it's a bunch of straight lines as I flew over the map to all the actually new content, most of the bigger picture untouched. I played for about 70 hours and it felt like I rushed through the game yet I didn't really have anything left to do. I don't really feel like I missed anything whatsoever. Like what's left beyond a few side quests that'll give me either nothing OR some clothing item (Likely from the first game) that I probably won't wear anyway. At most I'd just be doing another 60 samey shrines for no reason. Hard pass. There's so many points I would have just stopped playing if this wasn't a Zelda game, making me feel obligated to see it through. And I don't often drop games with zero interest in picking them back up.

This game is just botw without any of the smart game design and innovation, lacking any new novelty, and lacking in direction in general. As I did shrines for hours it just felt like I was playing an unfinished tech demo for an indie physics puzzle game with no personality. I was worried at the idea of the future of the Zelda series after botw because I didn't just want the series to become one predictable open world after another. What I didn't expect was for them to literally copy paste the same world. When you don't have the novelty and game design backing up this world, all you have to focus on is the new content. And said new content feels like every other open world game, as in, lazy and unsatisfying. This game steps on every mistake BotW tried so hard to avoid.

Worst Zelda by a long shot. Nuts and bolts did physics based vehicle creating significantly better in 2008, and did a way better job integrating it into the game. Because when you spend literal years making a mechanic maybe design the game around it? Only lingering thought is gee would I have a more positive experience if I tried it again but made better vehicles? Then I remember I'd have to sit through a horrendously long intro segment spanning hours, then do an obscene amount of boring shrines to get hearts (many of which being extremely slow tutorial shrines explaining basic botw mechanics because they forgot they made botw to get away from horrible tutorials like this), and then all I'd have left to do is 4 tiny dungeons that don't even utilize the vehicles anyway.

Aonuma says: "We always try to create something that offers more than previous titles. In that respect, we really aren't concerned with our older games anymore. We prefer to look to the future." Right after he makes a game that lifts 80% of the game they made 6 years ago, and forgets why he even made that first one to begin with. He also says he finds the old Zelda style restricting. Again, ironic considering this new style wastes over half a decade of dev time with nothing to show for it apparently. Story and music are some of the biggest parts of the franchise and they've NEVER been "restricted" until this new style came along. Dungeons were never this small and meaningless. They weren't forced to make 120 lifeless physics testing shrines in the old format. They used to be able to make thoroughly thought out, iconic locations. Now they have to invert the world and turn the lights off as a cheap way to get an extra 30+ hours of playtime out of a game they made like 5 hours of actual content for. There sure used to be a lot more dev time focused on enemy variety, set pieces, and the tight, smart design Nintendo is known for. But now that they're "not limited" they gotta spend so long coding physics objects they just have to slap them onto a game they already made because they wasted too much time already.

Man...botw really sold me on the new direction in a lot of ways but this makes me forget I ever liked it in the first place.