Although I have seen people talk about Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins just a bit more than its predecessor due to it being the last 2D Mario game until the release of New Super Mario Bros. in 2005, as well as it featuring the first appearance of Wario, I would still consider these two to be some of the most overlooked games in the entire franchise right alongside those Game Boy Color ports of Mario Tennis and Mario Golf that are actually sports-themed RPGs. On its own, Super Mario Land didn't age all that gracefully, but it was still a fun enough experience, but I was genuinely excited to play the sequel, even if it took me well over a year to actually get around to playing it. Even with that in mind, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins still managed to surprise me, and it worked as both a direct improvement on Super Mario Land and as a solid Mario game in its own right.

Super Mario Land had a number of features and mechanics that never made it to any other games in the series, and the same can be said for its sequel thanks to the amount of creative and interesting ideas that it brings to the table. Pretty much every level here in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins manages to stand out without feeling gimmicky with their different platforming challenges, and while none of the changes to the formula were as drastic as the bouncier fireballs, exploding koopa shells, and shoot-em-up levels of the previous game, their implementation still made the game as a whole feel unique. On top of having almost three times as many levels as the first game, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins is also much more consistent in its level design, and while Mario still felt a little slippery with his movements, the zoomed in screen and larger platforms made jumps feel a lot more precise. My favorite element of this game would easily be its world themes, because whereas Super Mario Land had worlds based on real-life locations, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins had a world based around a giant tree, a level set inside of a whale, a set of levels taking place within a giant mechanical Mario statue, and even some space levels a whole 15 years before Super Mario Galaxy. The sheer amount of variety and imagination in this game's world and level themes could arguably rival that of the Mario games on home consoles, and the ability to approach the levels in any order was a nice touch as well.

The first Super Mario Land has some of the best music in the whole series, and while the sequel's soundtrack didn't reach those heights for me, I still quite liked the songs here in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, as they were all catchy and fit the laid-back atmosphere of the levels quite well. Mario games were never exactly known for being challenging, but even then, the easiness of this game's levels paired with the game's bite-sized length still caught me off guard, and if you compare the steadily increasing difficulty of something like Super Mario Bros. 3 to the bosses in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins dying in less than five seconds (and occasionally less than even one second), the difference is night and day. I also felt that it really wasn't necessary for the game's final castle to have absolutely zero checkpoints, because while that level wasn't all that hard, it was still annoying to have to do everything from the beginning whenever you died. Despite its flaws, I still really enjoyed my time with Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, and I might even give the first four Wario Land games a go at some point.

When it comes to my experience with the shoot-em-up genre, a lot of it consists of me playing one of these kinds of games when I came across them in an arcade or as a minigame in something much larger rather than going out of my way to play anything specific. Most of my familiarity with the genre involves classics from the late 1970s and 1980s like Space Invaders, Galaga, or Gradius, as well as a few 90s gems like Pop'n TwinBee or Space Harrier, and while I had my fun with them, they never had me playing for very long. The first one of these games that I actually wanted to play from the beginning to the end, though, would be Ikaruga, as its basic gimmick and supposed high difficulty were enough to pique my interest, and thanks to my familiarity with its developer Treasure through Gunstar Heroes and Sin and Punishment, I became even more excited to check it out. My time with the game was quite short, but it was able to leave a huge impression on me, and while I still consider Sin and Punishment to be Treasure's best game, Ikaruga is a very close second.

Ikaruga is easy to understand, difficult to do well in, and even harder to master, but because the game took full advantage of its core mechanics, it ends up being an entirely rewarding experience rather than something rage-inducing. In this game, your ship can switch its polarity to not only do more damage to enemies of the opposite color, but also to absorb the attacks of those with the same polarity as you in order to fill up your energy meter and fire homing shots, as well as to simply not get killed instantly. While the game does still feature the knee-jerk reactions and fast pace that the genre is known for, this one mechanic adds a puzzle-like layer to its gameplay, as having the screen get coated head-to-toe in bullets and enemies of different polarities makes it so that you're less concerned with killing everything on the screen and more about knowing when to shift colors, where to go in order to fill up your energy meter as quickly as possible, and when to shoot out your homing attacks. The deceptive simplicity of Ikaruga meshes perfectly with the tough-as-nails level design, because the chapters and setpieces not only get harder as you go, but they also get more demanding of you and your skills, and having everything click as you figure out what moves to make in order to survive through a combination of memorizing enemy firing patterns and muscle memory is one of the most satisfying feelings I've ever felt in a video game. Despite how hard it can be, Ikaruga never resorted to cheap deaths or unfair tactics and instead made every single death feel like it was my own fault rather than that of the game, and that sense of refinement in both the game's mechanics and its level design made actually getting past that one hurdle and moving on to see what other crazy obstacle the game had in store for me made me immediately want to try again as soon as I ran out of continues rather than getting angry with the game and quitting for the day.

In all three of the games from Treasure that I've played so far, there's been at least one moment where the game fully leans in on the spectacle of its action and allows you to do something really impressive, and what's great about Ikaruga is that practically every moment of its five chapters has the potential for you to achieve that, and pulling one of these moments off rewards you with both a higher score and an unmatched sense of accomplishment. Since the game's central gimmick puts a strong emphasis on its visuals, it would only make sense for Ikaruga to be as stunning to look at as it is fun to play, as the gorgeous artstyle and effective compositions made the bullet hell moments and enemy formations into visual marvels. This especially applies to the game's hectic and immensely creative boss fights, with the battle against Tageri being my favorite moment in the whole game thanks to both how cool it looked and how satisfying it was. Ikaruga also features some amazing music from the game's director, Hiroshi Iuchi, and I especially loved how it was directly tied into the pace of each level. Ikaruga was an absolutely masterful game that not only became one of my favorite efforts from Treasure, but also my favorite shoot-em-up by far, and I really hope that I can check out the game that this served as the spiritual successor to, Radiant Silvergun, at some point.

Long before I started playing any of the games in the series, I assumed that the general consensus surrounding the Devil May Cry franchise was positive due to its sheer popularity, so when I found out that a majority of people actually hated Devil May Cry 2, I was both surprised and intrigued. Granted, a lot of my excitement towards playing this game was more out of morbid curiosity than anything, but I was still willing to give the game a chance to see if it wasn't as horrible as people kept saying it was, and I went into it with a half-joking "How bad can it be?" attitude. As someone who wasn't even that big of a fan of the first Devil May Cry game, I was baffled by just how much its sequel got wrong and just how incompetent it is, because while it wasn't outright unplayable (although it does border on that at times), Devil May Cry 2 was still an absolute disaster of a game that prides itself in being as dull of an experience as possible.

When I beat Devil May Cry on the last day of July, my thoughts on it were very complicated, but even with all of its flaws and odd design choices, I could at least say that the game wasn't boring. In Devil May Cry 2, though, boredom takes center stage, as it strips any ounce of challenge and depth from the first game's combat in favor of turning its core gameplay into a mindless shell of what came before it. In almost every situation you're thrown in, the absolute best and most effective strategy is to stand completely still and spam your gun button until all the enemies die, and since the melee combat is sluggish and unsatisfying and the enemies barely try to attack or even move towards you, this mind-numbing strategy ends up being your one answer to everything. Instead of trying to pull off flashy combos and alternating between melee and ranged attacks like in the first game, I was instead going from area to area and essentially mashing the square button until the battle music stopped playing while occasionally dodging an enemy's ranged attack, and the monotony of having to fight the same enemies using the same foolproof strategy while getting punished for trying literally anything else over and over again made playing this game feel more like Hell than the levels that took place in the actual Underworld. Speaking of which, Devil May Cry 2 replaces the Resident Evil-style exploration and puzzles of its first game in favor of making every single area in every stage take forever to get through, as Dante's slow running speed had me dodge rolling around these needlessly empty and bland locales just to get to the next section. Devil May Cry 2 also replaces the manual targeting of the original game with automatic targeting, and it not only made the boss fights (which were already a joke to begin with) take way longer to beat than they needed to due to your attacks constantly going in the other direction, but it also made activating the required switches nearly impossible with how the game would rather make you face the infinitely spawning enemies than the switch that you're deliberately trying to hit.

While the original Devil May Cry had some design choices that held the experience back for me, Devil May Cry 2 went beyond that and instead decided to add a bunch of features that were all completely superfluous, and I honestly found that to be more insulting. For some reason, Dante can run up walls now, and not only does he only go up a pitiful distance, but the only times where I ever actually used this move were all by mistake. The whole amulet mechanic is also useless, as the unlockable moves just ended up being incredibly situational during combat while also trying to sell the illusion of customization and player choice, and the required uses of each move for traversal both occurred exactly once immediately after they were unlocked. Despite all of these nonsensical additions, Devil May Cry 2 somehow managed to fail to fix one of the main issues of the first game, as the fixed camera is still disorienting to the point where it constantly obscures its objects of focus. On top of being absolutely miserable to play, Devil May Cry 2 also fell flat from a story perspective, as the nonsensical plot was made even worse thanks to Dante's personality being changed from a cocky goofball to a coin-flipping idiot that barely speaks. Having the second disc essentially be repeated content with a swapped protagonist was just an additional slap to the face, and this choice just screams lazy rather than giving the game any replay value. My hate for this game makes it so that even acknowledging its improvements on the original feels wrong, as the additions of an actual dodge button and the ability to swap weapons on the fly pale in comparison to just how bad everything else is in this game. Devil May Cry 2 was a chore of a game that felt atrocious to play, and since I've disliked both of the games from this franchise that I've played so far, I really hope that Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening makes up for it.

Although it has only been a little under a month since I beat Katamari Damacy, I have thought about it at least once a day since then, as I've been listening to the soundtrack very often (with "Que Sera Sera" and "Roll Me In" being on repeat in both my mind and my computer) while also checking out speedruns and world record rolls. All of this has made me incredibly excited to check out the game's sequel, We Love Katamari, and I was curious to see what it was about the game that made so many people consider it to be the better experience, and the ever-so-sweet Japanese box art featuring the game's development team posing in front of Namco being another motivator to finally give the game a go. Like the first game, I was won over by the charm of We Love Katamari right when I saw its intro play for the first time, and not only did this game retain the spirit of its predecessor, but it also brought so many new ideas to the table that I can't see it as anything other than the definitive Katamari experience.

Whether you were grabbing everything in your path, trying to collect a specific kind of item, or trying to grab the biggest single item while avoiding its smaller lookalikes, pretty much all of the levels in Katamari Damacy end up with you rolling the biggest ball you possibly can, and while those level types are still here in the sequel and are as fun as they've ever been, We Love Katamari features a lot more variety in terms of levels and objectives. We Love Katamari takes the core mechanics of the first game and expands on them through its constant recontexualizations, and moving on from cleaning up after the King of All Cosmos' mess and instead doing freelance work for the fans of the previous game means that you're completing tasks such as cleaning up a kid's room, helping a sumo wrestler eat enough food to prepare for his next match, rolling up a head for a giant snowman, or even trying to light a bonfire while also keeping your own katamari's flame from going out. Not only do these new game modes make the already unique concept of the first game feel fresh again, but one of the original modes involving rolling up a certain item type was made much more interesting, as collecting flowers in a beautiful meadow or rolling up a gingerbread house for Hansel and Gretel was infinitely more compelling than collecting objects simply because the King of All Cosmos wanted you to. Speaking of which, We Love Katamari featured a lot more locales for its levels than the first game, and while the satisfaction of learning your way around each level so that you can get bigger in a shorter amount of time is still here to an extent (especially with the addition of alternate objectives for completed levels), I still loved just how new almost all of the levels felt.

Like I mentioned earlier, We Love Katamari focuses on paying tribute to the fans that made Katamari Damacy the surprise hit that it was, and while the first game was already filled with joy (save for the verbal abuse coming from your in-game father whenever you fail a mission), this felt like a game made out of pure love and passion, and my mood would improve immediately whenever I sat down to play it, including the times where I was in an already good one. We Love Katamari retains the timeless artstyle and surrealist comedy of its predecessor, and its quirky look really got to shine during the grandiose, gorgeously animated, and often hilarious cutscenes that showed the King of All Cosmos' upbringing and how he fell in love with the Queen of All Cosmos. As expected, the shibuya-kei soundtrack was absolutely phenomenal, and while I'm not sure if I can decide between the music for this game or Katamari Damacy just yet, I will say that the song "Angel Rain" from the flower and firefly levels might just be my favorite individual track out of both of these games. Because this was essentially a direct improvement on the original game in pretty much every way, I'd go as far as to say that We Love Katamari is one of my favorite puzzle games, and while I'm not all that interested in checking out the other games from the Katamari franchise due to the lack of involvement from its creator, Keita Takahashi, I do want to eventually play some of the games that he made on his own, including his upcoming game To a T.

Although I was aware of Metroid: Other M being the one main entry in the franchise that people straight-up hate, I didn't know just how polarizing Metroid Fusion was within the fanbase until I beat Super Metroid last month. Because it didn't have the highly influential and acclaimed status of its predecessor, I got very curious to see what it was about Metroid Fusion that made a sort of black sheep within the series, and seeing people compare it to a horror game only made me more eager to give the game a go. Even with my somewhat positive expectations going into it, I really wasn't expecting to love Metroid Fusion as much as I did, and while it does deviate from the formula in a number of areas and even straight up misses the mark in others, I'd still consider this to be my favorite Metroid game by far. Whenever I'd see people criticize Metroid Fusion, there's a good chance that they'd throw the word "linearity" around a lot (even if you could argue that the other Metroid games were technically linear to begin with), and while it is easily the most straightforward game in the series so far, I'd say that this choice worked for what the game was trying to accomplish.

Metroid Fusion adopts an almost mission-based approach to its levels rather than having you explore an open-ended area at your own pace, but since this game also has a much stronger emphasis on its narrative, these two elements ended up meshing together in a very interesting way. The shift towards forcing Samus Aran to take orders not only works in having some of the plot's events feel more unsettling, but it also makes for an integral part of her character arc with how she tries to make sense of this enigmatic mission, and the game ends up having some genuinely compelling things to say about what it means to be human and our own relationship with technology. Samus herself felt the best to control here, as her movement speed felt significantly faster and snappier, and the levels themselves actually favored her vertical jumps over her horizontal ones, which made platforming significantly less frustrating here than it did in both the original Metroid and in Super Metroid. Even with the increased dialogue, character interactions, and cutscenes in the form of gorgeous sprite art, the sense of isolation and powerlessness was much more prevalent here in Metroid Fusion, as the enemies and environments got significantly creepier in both their designs and uses of environmental storytelling, and the lack of control that you have over your objectives and even what powerups you get access to made me feel genuinely anxious to see what new monstrosity will try to attack me whenever I got access to a new door or path. I also really liked the use of the X parasites in terms of both gameplay and narrative, as having them replace the usual random health and ammo pickups made refilling them much more consistent and reliable (as well as making for some interesting platforming challenges by having an X turn from one enemy into another), and having the game lean towards body horror by having these highly intelligent parasites not only take over the body of its host, but also alter its genetic makeup was both fascinating and unnerving. The integration of the SA-X was a stroke of genius to me, as the moments were you had to hide and run away from this overpowered killing machine were some of the most tense scenes in the entire series.

As much as I loved Metroid Fusion, I will not act like it's a perfect game, as it featured some questionable design choices while also retaining old ones that I wasn't a fan of to begin with. For some reason, you have to defeat a Core-X after every single boss fight, and while the fight itself isn't difficult (especially towards the late game), this gets old after the second boss and only feels more unnecessary as the game progresses. Speaking of which, I liked how much faster and more chaotic the boss fights were, but the bosses often had hitboxes that were almost as big as the rooms where the battles took place, and that made avoiding them and trying to get to their weak spot boil down to luck rather than strategic positioning, and it made the fights against Nightmare and Ridley especially annoying. Thankfully, Metroid Fusion has much less backtracking than the other Metroid games I've played, but it still retained a lot of the cryptic "blow up a random block" progression that felt outdated by the time Super Metroid came out, and the lack of an X-Ray Scope made that issue just that much more annoying to deal with. Even with these flaws, I still had an absolute blast with Metroid Fusion, and while I do want to play the other 2D Metroid games by eventually giving Metroid: Samus Returns and Metroid Dread a go, I want to play through the Metroid Prime trilogy first and see what they're all about.

The original Resident Evil was a game that, aside from some odd design choices and lovably bad voice acting, aged quite well when I played through it back in May, and it made me interested in checking out its two direct follow-ups. Despite the amount of praise I've heard about the remake from 2019 (along with it featuring a much more conventional control scheme), I wanted to stick with the original game so that I could see how the series evolved with each entry, and it would only make sense to play the PS1 version of Resident Evil 2 after playing the PS1 version of Resident Evil. Maybe it's because I didn't need as much time to adjust to the controls and the gameplay loop this time around, but it only took me three play sessions (roughly 235 minutes) to beat this game as opposed to the seven hours spaced out across ten-ish days that it took me to beat the original game, but even in that short amount of time, I could tell just how much better Resident Evil 2 was than its predecessor, as it improved on that game's general formula while also retaining what made it unique and engaging in the first place.

Before I had even gotten past the intro section in Raccoon City, I was impressed by just how much better Resident Evil 2 looked than the first game, especially when I considered how there was just a two year difference between them (although it's technically closer to less than a year if you don't count the time they spent working on the Resident Evil 1.5 build that eventually got scrapped). Instead of cheesy live action filled with Party City costumes, Resident Evil 2 features a solid amount of prerendered FMV cutscenes that were all filled with action and energy, and that cinematic approach made both the plot and the events surrounding it feel more compelling. The in-game textures and models were also much more detailed, which made the different rooms and areas within the run-down city streets, decrepit central police station, and sleek underground labs feel unique in both their looks and the eerie and often tense atmospheres that they evoked, with the returning fixed camera angles especially adding to this during combat encounters with the grotesque and fleshy enemies. Although the core gameplay loop of exploration, puzzle-solving, and combat hasn't changed, I felt that its execution was much smoother here thanks to the Raccoon Police Station being significantly smaller than the Spencer Mansion from the previous game, as that made backtracking and swapping items at the nearest item box far less tedious due to how much closer everything was while also making the individual areas stand out more. The tighter, more claustrophobic rooms and hallways also strengthened the game's emphasis on action, as it not only made the increased combat encounters intense by not always giving you the option to run past your enemy, but it also made coming across ammo and healing items more gratifying due to how much more often they're needed and how scarce they felt to come across.

On top of having a more interesting plot and more well-written flavor text, I also thought that Resident Evil 2 featured much better characters, and more of them at that. While he isn't quite the lovable, one-liner-spouting himbo that he becomes in Resident Evil 4, I still liked playing as Leon Kennedy, and the relationship that he develops with the mysterious Ada Wong over the course of the game was especially compelling. While the voice acting and dialogue weren't as hilariously awful as what was in the original Resident Evil, they both still retained at least some level of campiness, even if none of it made me laugh like it did in the first game. The idea of having certain actions from your first playthrough affect the ones in your second playthrough was also very interesting, and it gave a lot more replay value to the game rather than having the choice between two characters simply be a difficulty select screen like in the previous game. Resident Evil 2 was a great survival horror game that massively improved on the ideas present in its predecessor, and despite how I was already excited to eventually play Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, my enjoyment with this game has made me look forward to the next one even more.

Despite how long it's been since the series got an actual new game (especially if you rule out the slightly more recent mobile games), I've always considered Crazy Taxi to be one of Sega's most iconic franchises, as having it spawn a few sequels and a ton more knockoffs really cemented its place in both the racing genre and video games as a whole. Even with this in mind, I never got the chance to try this game out, and as much as I wish I could give the original arcade cabinet a try, I decided to play the game's PS2 port instead. This is one of those games that I can see myself coming back to very often in the future, because while it does have some drawbacks and I really can't see myself playing it for more than 30 or 60 minutes in one sitting, Crazy Taxi is still an absolute blast to play.

Growing up, pretty much every clip of the game I saw in a YouTube video mentioning it looked totally wild and in-your-face, but even then, nothing compares to actually playing Crazy Taxi. 24 years after the game's original release, there's still nothing that plays or controls quite like it, as the blistering speeds, short fares, and hilariously janky physics will have you crashing, dashing, and drifting your way to your next stop if it means getting any more money out of your current passenger before they jump out of your cab out of impatience. Crazy Taxi has a slew of different techniques and mechanics that you absolutely need to get the hang of in order to get a high score at the cost of the game itself doing a horrible job of actually explaining them to you, but once you do figure them out, it feels great to actually pull them off and get that much closer to the fabled Class-S license, with the Crazy Drift being especially fun thanks to its potential for chaining moves to get a higher combo. Speaking of which, Crazy Taxi encourages you to pull off as many tricks and moves as you can during each fare to not only make it to your destination in time, but to also get extra money through a higher combo string, and this combined with the aforementioned amount of moves can lead to some immensely satisfying moments of linking one move to another, such as going from a Crazy Drift to a Crazy Dash so that you can jump off of a ramp before having a bunch of near misses with oncoming traffic. The game's totally-not-San-Francisco map was also quite well designed with its emphasis on landmarks and opportunities to use your moves (including a staggering amount of product placement), and memorizing the routes to and from destinations made making the most out of the simple to pick up, yet difficult to master control scheme all the more rewarding. The punk rock soundtrack from the bands Bad Religion and The Offspring gave Crazy Taxi a lot of its loud, yet charming personality and offbeat late 1990s attitude, and despite how bite-sized the game is, the voice lines from B.D. Joe (and only B.D. Joe, because I literally never picked anyone else) are practically etched into my brain.

On its own, the core gameplay and arcade modes of Crazy Taxi are as fun as they are chaotic and addicting, but the console version comes with an extra addition that I felt was totally at odds with the rest of the game, and that would be the Crazy Box challenges. On the surface, having a set of challenges to complete that also serve as a way to teach the player about the game's mechanics seems like a good idea, but for some reason, a majority of these challenges are demanding to the point where it's frustrating. A lot of these missions are ones where making even one tiny mistake means that you have to reset from the beginning due to how tight the time limits are, but because the game's almost inherent jank is the kind that can pretty much only fit a fast-paced arcade game, you'll often end up restarting the missions constantly over factors that never feel like your fault, as the controls in this context feel like they're working against you. It doesn't help that the button timings for the Crazy Drift and especially the Crazy Dash are so strict that they don't even register half the time, and while that's perfectly fine in the game's arcade mode, it doesn't mesh well at all with the challenges where every single move you make has to be absolutely perfect if you want to get even the bare minimum score. I also wasn't a fan of the game's "Original" map that was added in addition to the one from the actual arcade game, although that's more of a preference thing than an actual criticism. Despite its flaws, I still had a lot of fun with Crazy Taxi, even if I don't see any reason to pick up any of the sequels any time soon.

Before they were bought by Microsoft and banished to the purgatory of making Kinect games (and also Sea of Thieves) for the rest of their days, Rare was known for making quality games on Nintendo's home consoles. Because of this, I wanted to play Banjo-Kazooie ever since I was a kid, but I've been especially interested in checking the game out after spending the past few years becoming well acquainted with Rare's 2D platforms and first-person shooters, and I wanted to see their take on the 3D platformer genre. After beating the game with a total of 95 out of 100 Jiggies, I can honestly say that I had a lot of fun with Banjo-Kazooie, and while I did end up having some gripes with it here and there, I still thought that Banjo-Kazooie was a great game overall.

Aside from being an early 3D platformer, Banjo-Kazooie was also one of the first collectathons with its emphasis on having to collect as many Jiggies and music notes as possible in order to progress to the next area, and so it's a good thing that Rare made everything involving that exact process feel so fun and rewarding. Each of the game's nine levels is brimming with life thanks to the game's atmospheric, yet playful music, expressive artstyle, and especially the eccentric cast of characters and enemies, with the dry, sarcastic sense of humor making the moments where you help these characters out all the more memorable. Even the slightly more generic level themes, such as the desert and snow levels, ended up feeling unique thanks to their NPCs, as I went from being a great stand-in Dad to three polar bear cubs to feeling incredibly bad for Gobi and how he can never catch a break from Kazooie's Beak Buster. On top of having a generally fluid and snappy set of moves (including the additional ones that are learned throughout the game), Banjo-Kazooie would also occasionally give you the opportunity to transform into an animal with the help of the skull-faced shaman Mumbo Jumbo, and these opened up new opportunities for exploration in each level while also adding more variety to their challenges, puzzles, and minigames.

The general gameplay loop of exploring a level from head to toe in order to find all of its secrets was one that never really got dull for me, and while some of the requirements got a bit demanding towards the end (with me having to backtrack all the way to the first stage just to find a few of the Jiggies that I had missed just to open the final portrait), the satisfaction of collecting all the Jiggies and music notes in a level was strong enough to keep me going. Despite how solid the controls were, I felt that the game's camera could've been a lot better, because while it was definitely an improvement on the camera controls in something like Super Mario 64, the fixed viewpoints made aspects like the already wonky swimming controls feel even less reliable to deal with. The only level that I straight-up disliked here was "Rusty Bucket Bay", as it not only had some genuinely bad music, but it also had an entire segment filled with cheap instant deaths and its inclusion of oil water made traversal feel tiresome. Speaking of which, dying during a level in Banjo-Kazooie means that you have to recollect all of the music notes that you already got (along with the five Jinjos if you hadn't already found them by that point), and this made levels like the aforementioned "Rusty Bucket Bay" feel flat-out tedious. Even with all of this in mind, I still had a great time with Banjo-Kazooie, and although I think it'll be a while before I check out Banjo-Tooie, I might give Conker's Bad Fur Day a go some time soon.

Devil May Cry is one of Capcom's most popular franchises, and despite being a fan of some of the games that it went on to inspire, I never had any experience with the series itself. As an outsider, the general consensus seemed to be that a majority of people started with Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening or even the latest game in the franchise, Devil May Cry 5, but I figured that I should try and get into the series with the one that started it all. Devil May Cry was one of those games where, for a majority of my six-ish hour playthrough, I genuinely had no idea whether or not I was enjoying what I was playing, because while the game does have some good elements and interesting concepts, it is so heavily bogged down by poor and outright frustrating design choices that it boggles my mind how the game was even able to make it to store shelves, let alone spawn several sequels.

Before I go on and rant about everything that I found wrong with this game, I want to first start off with what Devil May Cry did well, and it's a good thing that there's quite a lot of positives to choose from. Stylistically, Devil May Cry is very striking and memorable, as the decrepit castles, damp caves, and especially the fleshy, pulsating depiction of the underworld made the game feel like an interesting tonal balancing act between effortless cool and an almost horror-like sense of unease with how you're venturing into the unknown. The score by Masami Ueda, Masato Kohda, and Misao Senbongi was incredibly effective in establishing the game's mood with its shifts between roaring, blood-pumping guitars and ominous ambient music, with the darkly ethereal track used for the Divinity Statues eventually becoming a favorite of mine. The core gameplay of Devil May Cry was also quite good, as the twitchy, fast-paced attacks and dodges not only made fighting enemies fun on its own, but it also made chaining combos together in order to get more red orbs feel satisfying. I didn't even mind the exploration that usually took place in between combat encounters, because while this was clearly an element of the game that was left over from when this was initially envisioned as the fourth Resident Evil game, it still gave me more chances to take in the setting's sights and sounds. Despite the unintentionally funny dialogue and voice acting and somewhat barebones storytelling, I still found the game's lore and Dante himself to be compelling enough for me to want to see it through to the end, although I felt that the relationship between him and Trish was a bit forced due to the sudden attempts at emotional impact being at odds with the little time these two characters actually spent with each other.

For every good thing I have to say about Devil May Cry, there's some aspect of it that aggravates me to no end, and while none of it was enough to make me outright hate the game, the flaws still felt glaring. For starters, the game's camera is absolutely atrocious, as having it constantly cut to different angles was annoying enough when you're exploring the area, but it made some of the boss fights barely even playable with how you get attacked by moves that you couldn't even see in the first place, whether it was because the camera was pulled too far back for anything to be visible or it was because it was at an angle where the objects of focus were straight up hidden. This makes the game's repeated boss fights even more annoying to deal with, as the game only has about four or five bosses that are repeated several times each (and in the case of Nightmare, having to repeat a boss fight just to repeat a boss fight), and it gets to the point where you fight a boss in one mission to go on and fight the exact same one in the very next mission. I also felt that the mission design was radically inconsistent, as some missions featured several bosses and took a good fifteen or twenty minutes (which was especially annoying thanks to the continues being consumable items), while others could be beaten in less than five minutes. Although the controls felt good when it came to combat, I can't say the same for the other game's aspects, as the clunky and unreliable wall jumps made platforming take way longer than it needed to and the underwater sections that turned the game into a first-person shooter were so jarring and controlled so poorly that I had no idea why they were even included in the game to begin with. There's a good game here somewhere, but there was a lot about Devil May Cry that held it back for me, but despite my mixed feelings on this game, I'm still interested in checking out the rest of the series (including the infamous Devil May Cry 2).

Like the first game, Super Mario Galaxy 2 was something that I played a lot of as a kid, but never actually completed, and so it was one of my most anticipated games to come back to during the summer. After a lot of complications and trial and error involving trying to hack my Wii, I briefly considered buying an entirely new console just to hack that and go back to the games I had saved on a hard drive, but I eventually caved in and decided to run the game on Dolphin (after a bit of button mapping, of course). Right when I first booted the game up a few days ago, the memories came flooding back to me, but even without the nostalgia, I still had an absolute blast with Super Mario Galaxy 2.

Ever since this game came out, pretty much everyone has been torn as to whether the first Super Mario Galaxy game was better than the second one, and while I wasn't sure about where I stood on the debate at first (especially considering how much I love both of these games), I think I might prefer the latter game. While the original game had a better hub world and a stronger emotional core thanks to Rosalina's gradually unlocked backstory (along with Rosalina herself being a more interesting companion than Lubba), Super Mario Galaxy 2 was more fun and interesting to play, as everything that made the original game so exciting and new was refined here. Rather than recontexualizing one level through multiple stars, Super Mario Galaxy 2 instead has practically every main star be its own level, with the mechanics and bosses of each one feeling more unique and creative as a result. The powerups were also much more well utilized here, as not only did most of the powerups from the first game return here (with the unfortunate exception of the Ice Flower and the Red Star), but the new ones felt a lot more dynamic to use, with the Cloud Flower being applied in especially fun ways. Bringing Yoshi back for this game was also a great addition thanks to his double jump and tongue abilities working alongside the gravity-defying levels, and his three powerups were especially fun to toy around with. Seeing characters from earlier on in the game show up in different galaxies was also an interesting idea, as completing challenges for the Chimp or different Gearmos was fun in its own right while also giving me a good reason to revisit these levels. Generally speaking, I felt that the level design in Super Mario Galaxy 2 were a bit more challenging than in its predecessor (and that especially applies to the Prankster Comets), but the emphasis on platforming challenges and getting a grip on Mario's movement meant that none of my deaths felt cheap.

Despite how old the Wii's hardware was by this point (even if you don't take the Wii itself basically being an upgraded GameCube into account), I'd say that Super Mario Galaxy 2 was not only one of the best looking games on the system, but also of its year, as the vibrant colors and beautiful artstyle made the game a joy to look at while also breathing tons of life into its eccentric side characters and varied locales. The orchestral score that Koji Kondo and Mahito Yokota created for Super Mario Galaxy was arguably the best score of the entire Mario franchise, and while I'm not sure if their work on Super Mario Galaxy 2 exceeded it, I'd definitely put them as equals. If there was one complaint that I had about Super Mario Galaxy 2, it would be the fact that they decided to bring back some of the less fun elements from the first game, as I wasn't a fan of the Spring Mushroom or the dreaded ball level the first time around and I especially didn't like them when they came back. Even with that in mind, though, Super Mario Galaxy 2 was still a superb game that improved on the structure of its predecessor while still retaining its sense of awe and magic, and while neither of them are totally perfect, both of these games still hold a very special place in my heart thanks to how many hours I had spent on them as a kid.

After trying to find different ways to play Castlevania: Rondo of Blood for over a month, I eventually came to the conclusion that my one way to play the game without having to wait a few months to get my PlayStation 4 out of storage was to unlock it (along with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night) through its PSP remake, Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles. The whole idea surrounding this was weird to me, because if Konami was going to put two of the most acclaimed games in one of their most beloved franchises on a portable console, then it would've made a lot more sense for them to just release the games as they were instead of tacking them onto a lifeless remake that nobody asked for. Regardless, I sat down one night and begrudgingly played my way through this newer version just to get to play the games that I actually wanted in the first place, but while I thought that my frustration was coming going through this roundabout way just to save $18, playing the original game made me quickly realize that a lot of that came from the game itself. Maybe it's because I got used to how fun and fluid Super Castlevania IV was to play back when I beat it in June, but I felt pretty much nothing but frustration with Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, and I spent every moment of my three-ish hour playthrough wanting to just get it over with.

If there's one positive thing that I can say about Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, it would be that it was easily the best looking and sounding game in the series so far. On top of having some awesome music, the colorful and detailed 16-bit graphics made for a thick and grim atmosphere, especially when you compare it to the drab, lifeless look of the 2007 remake. Castlevania: Rondo of Blood also features some stylish anime-style cutscenes, but the version that I played would have the sound randomly cut out after a certain point (which also happened frequently during the game), so I ended up having to rewatch them on YouTube just to understand what was happening. There were also some interesting ideas at play with the actual levels, as the branching paths made it feel rewarding to explore each stage. Richter Belmont also has a few new moves that I liked in concept, but in practice, I didn't get very much use out of them. The backflip was somewhat useful for very specific boss attacks and was inconsistent everywhere else, and while I did like the idea of Item Crash attacks, I rarely ever used them out of fear of wasting my hearts.

Putting the things that I liked about the game aside, Castlevania: Rondo of Blood made me feel like I was playing the original game on the NES again, and I really don't mean that as a compliment. Rather than the genuinely fun control scheme of Super Castlevania IV, this game decided to retain the clunky, slow, and unreliable controls of the first game, which made the game a thousand times less fun for me. Even when the game isn't throwing NES-era one-hit deaths and infinitely spawning enemies at you during the game's last stretch, playing as Richter is so sluggish and unresponsive that killing even the simplest enemies is an absolute headache, and the game's emphasis on memorizing enemy placement rather than being able to just play the game made playing it feel like a chore. Granted, I did get much more use out of my items here than I did in Super Castlevania IV, but even then, I don't understand the thinking behind deliberately making your game unfun to play when you've clearly proven that you can do the opposite. I've heard that unlocking Maria makes the game much for fun to play, but going to her room would make the game freeze as the cutscene audio played in the background before crashing entirely, so I was essentially locked in a permanent hard mode. Calling Castlevania: Rondo of Blood a bad game would be a bit of a stretch, and it was definitely better than that first NES game, but it certainly wasn't a fun one, and since I've been looking forward to play Castlevania: Symphony of the Night ever since I was a kid, I really hope that it's worth it.

After initially beating the game back in December of 2020, I have found myself coming back to GoldenEye 007 whenever I couldn't think of much else to do, and because of that, the game has always been on my mind all this time. Granted, most of what I did for these past three-ish years was just replay the "Facility" level with at least one of the two cheat codes I'd unlocked turned on, but I still do really like the rest of the game, even if I won't pretend like some of its elements have aged all that gracefully. Although I have known about Perfect Dark for about as long as I'd known about GoldenEye 007, I was a bit hesitant to play it due to me not knowing if my emulator had any settings regarding the Expansion Pack that the game required, but once I found out that it worked just fine, I immediately sat down to play it and kept doing that for three days. I had pretty positive expectations for the game going into it, but I really wasn't expecting to love Perfect Dark as much as I did, and I'd honestly consider it to be my favorite game made by Rare so far.

Since this game was a spiritual successor to Rare's landmark first-person shooter, it would make sense for them to retain a lot of what made that game unique, but Perfect Dark went beyond that and vastly improved on everything that GoldenEye 007 had initially set out to accomplish. The maze-like level design and objective-based missions that increase alongside the difficulty are still here, but breaking said missions down into smaller levels that were linked made it so that it wasn't as easy to get lost while still giving you the opportunity to move around the game's environments freely in order to see where your next objective was. Speaking of which, the visuals in Perfect Dark were much more varied and detailed than in GoldenEye 007 (although that game was definitely limited by the fact that it had to stay true to the film that it was based on), as the cyberpunk artstyle made the shootouts and exploration go from taking place in sleek office buildings and grimy city streets to neon-lit alien spaceships and planets all while having the game retain its atmosphere of espionage and secrecy through its cool gadgets and wildly over-the-top storytelling. The gunplay here generally felt the same as it did in GoldenEye 007 (although this game features actual reload animations and some better aiming), but there were many more weapons this time around, and everything from the pistols to the laptop guns to the alien rifles feels great to use. Perfect Dark also fixed one of my biggest issues with Rare's previous shooter and drastically increased the draw distance, which made the game's outdoor snow level fun to explore due to the fact that I wasn't being gunned down by enemies that I couldn't even see this time around.

Like I mentioned earlier, Perfect Dark features a bizarre and unpredictable story that quickly kicks into high gear, and one of the elements that made it so entertaining for me would be the voice acting. Unlike the exclusive use of text boxes in GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark is fully voice acted, and both the dialogue and performances had a level of cheesiness to them that both fit right at home with the game's spy theme and also made the characters more distinct and likable, with the grey alien named Elvis being my favorite of the cast. Despite how long I've been playing GoldenEye 007, I didn't get to experience the game's iconic multiplayer mode until just a few months ago when a flatmate and I decided to play it on a whim, but I got to play a lot more of it here in Perfect Dark. Not only was the multiplayer fun here, but it also featured more gamemodes than just different variations of deathmatch, and it even allowed for a lot of mode customization. I also really enjoyed exploring Carrington Institute in between missions and Combat Simulator matches, as I found it to be a compelling hub world with a lot of personality. Not only would I consider Perfect Dark to be one of the best games on the Nintendo 64, but I'd even go as far as to say that it's one of my favorite first-person shooters, and while I still think that GoldenEye 007 is worth playing, Perfect Dark was easily the far superior experience.

Although I was definitely curious to see what the first game in the series was like when I sat down to beat it last year, Super Metroid was the game that I was actually excited about, and a lot of that anticipation came from my experience with the game's intro sequence. At one point during what must've been middle school, I went on an online emulator and decided to boot up Super Metroid on a whim in between bite-sized play sessions of Contra and Mike Tyson's Punch Out!!, and the music, environmental storytelling, and especially that fight against Ridley all made the game intriguing to me. That sequence ended up being stuck in my mind for years, and on top of how great it was to relive it when I began my playthrough with this game, I ended up really enjoying Super Metroid as a whole, even if I didn't think that it was perfect.

Like all good sequels (or threequels, in this case, but I haven't played Metroid II: Return of Samus yet), Super Metroid took what worked with the first game and expanded on it, and the game did this while also injecting some of its own unique ideas. The sense of isolation from the first game is much thicker and more atmospheric here, as the decrepit environments and occasionally grotesque enemy design made venturing into the unknown feel eerie and unsettling, along with the areas feeling genuinely distinct from one another rather than just being simple color swaps like in the original game. The gameplay loop of exploring to find new items and areas felt exciting rather than tedious here thanks to the substantially larger map and decreased amounts of required backtracking, with the addition of an actual map being a lifesaver (although remembering which rooms were which was still a bit difficult). The sense of progression through the power-ups and items in Super Metroid is palpable, as having the initially annoying enemies get decimated by your missiles and arm cannon upgrades is satisfying in ways that the original Metroid struggled to convey. This directly ties into the game's tense and chaotic boss fights, with some of the scripted moments making for some surprisingly effective bits of silent storytelling. The score by Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano was superb, as their memorable, yet evocative and ominous tracks were very effective in conveying the mood of each of the game's areas.

One of my least favorite aspects of the original Metroid was when I'd end up in an empty room, shoot the walls and ceiling at random in order to see where to go next, and then being annoyed with the fact that I was supposed to blow up some arbitrary block that looked just like the rest of the room, and this issue of random, cryptic design unfortunately found its way to Super Metroid on multiple occasions. Granted, the addition of the X-Ray Scope fixes this issue to an extent, but it arrives a bit too late into the game for it to be as useful as it could have been. The only area of the game that I straight up disliked in its entirety would be Maridia, as the spike in backtracking and the inclusion of quicksand that is unreasonably vexing to get out of made it a slog to get through. For the most part, the controls are an improvement on the first game, but I still found Samus' jumps to be inconsistent, with wall jumps being especially fiddly to pull off without eventually unlocking the Space Jump. Despite my gripes with the game, I still thought that Super Metroid was a great game that refined what was set up by the first game, and since I've heard good things about Metroid Fusion, I'll check that out at some point.

Out of all the flagship game franchises that have come out for the PlayStation and its four successors, the Katamari series might've been the one that I knew the least about, which also made me very intrigued by it as a result. The only two things that I knew about the game were that you roll up a giant ball and that your father is a cosmic being, and my knowledge of the game stayed this limited up until I actually started playing it a few days ago. As soon as the game's theme started to play alongside the opening cutscene, I had a huge smile on my face, and that smile pretty much never went away whenever I was playing the game. Despite how short my playthrough was, I had an absolute blast with Katamari Damacy, and I've really never played anything like it.

Like I just mentioned, the core gameplay of Katamari Damacy involves rolling the titular ball around to collect objects, but there's so much more built in to that central idea that ends up making the game feel engaging, laid-back, and rewarding to play. Whether you're aiming to get as big of a katamari as possible to create a star or focusing on collecting specific objects to make constellations, rolling up a large amount of items is always going to be one of your main objectives in some way, as working your way through the map in terms of both navigating its terrain and clearing it out of objects adds a layer of strategy that makes you think about what routes to take, when to slow down, and when to speed up as you go against the clock. A lot of games try to evoke a sense of scale by simply making something much larger than you, but Katamari Damacy approaches this in a wholly unique way by making it both visual and mechanical, as going from collecting coins and being chased by cats to picking up monster trucks, buildings, bridges, and giant octopi is immensely satisfying with how your obstacles end up scurrying away from you in fear once you tower over them. Although the controls were a bit odd at first, they're simple enough to the point where getting a grasp on makes them feel second nature while also making your (slightly) more complex maneuvers feel useful in the right situations, with the Prince's dash being a lifesaver towards the end of the game. Katamari Damacy also features some collectathon elements by having you track the amount of objects you've collected, and the humorous descriptions were one of the main reasons as to why I wanted to do my absolute best during each level.

Despite how the record-scratch-fluent King of All Cosmos spends a majority of the game berating you, Katamari Damacy consistently maintains a lighthearted and goofy atmosphere, as every element is infused with the game's childlike wonder and charm. Along with the gameplay and timeless artstyle being chock full of surreal sight gags and satirizations of Japanese culture, the actual writing of Katamari Damacy made me laugh consistently, and that goes for both the King of all Cosmos' dialogue and the bite-sized cutscenes involving the Hoshino family whose English dubbing and breezy atmosphere weirdly reminded me of The Flying Luna Clipper. It pretty much goes without saying that all of the music here in Katamari Damacy was absolutely incredible, as the eclectic shibuya-kei songs were all immensely catchy, memorable, and imbued with joy. I will say that there was a bit of jank to this game that took away from the experience, though, as I somehow got stuck in the terrain with no way of getting out several times. That complaint is minuscule when compared to what the game did well, though, as Katamari Damacy was an awesome and wholly original game that I loved from start to finish, and I honestly can't wait to see what the game's sequel, We Love Katamari, is like.

As someone who liked The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild quite a lot, but didn't see it as the masterpiece that everyone else did, I went into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom with somewhat positive expectations, as the only thing I really asked of it was for the gripes that I had with the first game to be remedied. At first, I partially didn't want to pick this game up too soon before playing through some other Zelda games first (which is kind of why I powered through Ocarina of Time over the past week or so), but once the FOMO kicked in, I finally went out of my way to buy the game around five weeks ago and have been playing it since then. Even if I wasn't on board the massive hype train that had been chugging across the internet for six years, Tears of the Kingdom still managed to have me feeling let down and burned out by the time my 55-ish hour playthrough was over, and while it's definitely a good game, a lot of that didn't feel like it came from the new ideas that Nintendo brought to the table this time around. Despite the game's sleek presentation, six year wait, and $70 price tag, Tears of the Kingdom felt less like an actual sequel to Breath of the Wild and more like a standalone expansion or DLC, as it simply adds stuff on top of the previous game rather than truly refining or revamping the formula. Rather than fixing the same-y shrines, level scaling, repetitive Korok challenges, forgettable sidequests with pitiful rewards, flat-out bad voice acting, or even the Z-targeting which they somehow haven't figured out how to switch targets for since 1998, Nintendo decided to add a new set of powers and two new areas, and all three of these managed to feel flawed in their own ways.

The main selling point of Tears of the Kingdom seems to be the Ultrahand with how it lets you build vehicles and structures using Zonai devices, but I got sick of it very quickly. In Breath of the Wild, the physics engine wasn't really that much of an issue, but since this new game draws so much attention to it with its emphasis on building stuff, I ended up having to spend minutes at a time just attaching and reattaching parts and devices at the right angle due to how finicky the whole system was just for the build to not even work when I turned it on. The implementation of Autobuild felt like their way of fixing this by having you instantly reconstruct builds that you've already made, but this just felt like Nintendo solving a problem that they created in the first place rather than just avoiding it entirely. When I wasn't rebuilding the same flying devices or combat devices, I'd often just glide or climb my way to get to where I wanted to go just so that I wouldn't have to deal with the hassle that came with trying to play with Nintendo's new box of LEGOs, and even then, the ability itself wasn't substantial enough to the point where it made me go "Wow, these guys really broke new ground". The other three powers were decent enough additions, but they all just sort of felt shallow and one-note, as Fuse was less about experimenting with different weapon and material combinations and more about just picking the material that did the most damage, Ascend only really let you phase through the smooth, flat surfaces that the developers wanted you to phase through, and Recall just became a case of either "throw the projectile back at the enemy" or "grab the material that Tulin blew off of a cliff because you were trying to pick it up and both of these actions are mapped to the same button".

Along with the middling new selection of powers, Tears of the Kingdom decided to add a whole two new area types, and neither of them felt all that compelling. A lot of the game's marketing tried to make the new Sky area seem like a big part of the game, but its implementation is comically insignificant. Although the initial tutorial area in the sky is huge, all of the game's other sky islands are incredibly small, and the slightly bigger ones house little more than Zonai dispensers, shrines that make you bring a crystal to a specified location over and over again, and a copypasted miniboss made of blocks. Even if the sky felt lackluster, it doesn't compare to just how lame the Depths were to me, as all you do there is mine more Zoanite for your builds and light up lightroots so that you can light up more lightroots. Even if you try to explore the Depths to find items like new armor pieces, each of the Depths' sections is literally walled off, so you have to constantly go in and out of the Depths through different craters just to keep exploring an already dull area. Going into this game, I was expecting it to feel similar, but I was genuinely surprised to see how little of the main overworld changed when compared to the first game. Granted, the main towns and the areas where you meet the sages have been affected by the in-game Upheaval, but other than that, the world of Tears of the Kingdom looks and feels exactly the same with its world layout, regions, and backwards sense of progression, and the sense that I was just playing more Breath of the Wild was what made get really fatigued with this game really quickly. Even the supposedly new temples felt pretty much the same as the Divine Beasts from the previous game, although they came packaged in with laughably easy boss fights, puzzles that could be beaten in a good two seconds, and the literal exact same cutscene after each temple that feels duller and duller each time it comes up.

To me, one of the elements that made Breath of the Wild feel so refreshing was how little the game tried to steer you in the supposed "right" direction, but I felt that Tears of the Kingdom sort of fumbled this by placing a greater emphasis on its story. Instead of opening the world to you right from the get go like the previous game, Tears of the Kingdom makes you sit through a lengthy, handholding opening sequence and a lengthy, handholding tutorial, and even quite a few of the shrines that you find in the world were straight up tutorials for the game's mechanics and physics rather than actual challenges. The actual story is decent enough, but a lot of it got held back by the choice to include a lot of it through the collectible Dragon Tear cutscenes. Not only did the cutscenes themselves largely consist of stiff characters spouting exposition, but the narrative of the main quests doesn't totally mesh with that of the Dragon Tears, as the game acts as if you're unaware of the reveals and details that it already showed you. I understand that this review is largely negative, but I want to clarify that I did enjoy my time with Tears of the Kingdom. The core gameplay from Breath of the Wild is already fun on its own, and my Switch battery went from fully charged to 0% practically every time I picked the game up, but since those ideas felt a lot fresher back in that first game than it does now, simply repeating it while including a few new additions wasn't enough to make me go head over heels for this game. Tears of the Kingdom is definitely a solid game, but it's also one of the most disappointing games I've played in a long time, and even with its flaws that I consider to be glaring, it will still manage to win Game of the Year because people seem to eat this sort of thing up.