Saying I've never really got Tetris sounds absurd, after all it carries with it this aura of having existed forever, being this fundamental timeless entity, but the reality is I simply see no reason to sit down and grind out high scores in games. This isn't the death knell of every arcade game, there's plenty of appeal to many of them simply from getting through all of their levels for the first time and calling that it, but Tetris is a suitably monotone experience that I kind of feel like I've seen what there is to see after 15 minutes of playing and so I move on.

This is a simplification of course, and there is more to see in Tetris; put in enough time investment and you'll start to briefly enter flow states, and so too you end up experiencing the tetris effect as everything just starts naturally clicking and you stop having to think quite so actively. Tetris Effect is the first time I've really understood this; partly because all the different music, visuals and associated vibes to be seen in the game give a good motivation to keep playing beyond the first hour or two, but also because, for me at least, the intense and stunning audio-visual elements are perfect for helping encourage me to slip into those flow states where you so naturally find yourself seamlessly planning a whole move ahead, your fingers effortlessly shoving the pieces where you planned for them to go whilst your eyes scan around figuring out that next move in advance. It's immensely satisfying when all of this just starts to come together.

I'm still not in love with Tetris, and I found myself putting down Tetris Effect for good once I'd completed the hard mode campaign, but I am thankful that I do finally get the appeal now.

I love how visually dense this game is, notes flying all over the screen from any possible direction whilst in the background flashy music videos featuring Miku herself play, and yet how the game manages to clearly communicate itself despite this visual density; the notes moving towards their respective pads, spinning clocks on the pads ticking down to the moment you need to press the corresponding button, distances between these pads indicating roughly how big the gaps will be between the notes in the song, and the beat of the music itself, all serve to provide information as to when exactly you're going to have to press those buttons, every single element of this a necessary part of the equation at some point but which indicators are the right ones to rely on in any particular moment is very contextual, depending on exactly which part of this informational cacophony is going to be the easiest bit to parse, something that you have to be able to instinctively adjust to moment-to-moment.

I also love how you can play notes on either side of the controller. The notes presented on-screen will always describe a specific button on a specific side of the controller, and typically act as solid suggestions for how you should be doing things, but the two sides of the controller itself are functionally identical when it comes to these inputs so once you get comfortable with the controls it starts to make sense to shift notes from one side to the other, ignoring what the game says and turning that triangle note into an up note for example, in moments where it makes things easier for you. Eventually this becomes so second nature that you stop seeing that triangle note as a triangle note in the first place as you freely flow back and forth from side to side; it's a really satisfying way for the game to work mechanically, and that evolution with how you approach and see it is a lot of fun to go through.

So mechanically this game is incredibly sound and among the better rhythm games I've encountered. Despite that I found myself falling off of Project Diva Future Tone quite fast? Part of the problem is a thing I often struggle at with arcade-y videogames which is that I don't find seeking a higher score particularly motivating, and when there's nothing resembling a campaign mode to work through then that's all there really is to do here; try and get better, complete higher difficulties and get those higher scores whilst doing essentially the same thing over and over. It's not really for me. I also say this as someone who has only a passing familiarity with Hatsune Miku, and who hasn't really listened to said music in several years, but I wish the song list here was more aggressively curated. There's over 200 songs here, and some of them are great, but there's also a lot of stuff that reads as filler to my unfamiliar ears and at times this can lead to the experience of playing this game turning into a bit of a blur for me. All of this means that despite my strong initial impressions of Project Diva Future Tone I just haven't played that much of it and struggle to imagine playing that much more.

I choose to believe that Swery's intentions were good with this game, and I'm glad it seems to have genuinely helped some people, but I'm so tired of trans stories being portrayed just through the struggles of dysphoria rather than through the growing confidence and happiness that transitioning can lead to, through the pain wrought upon trans people by society rather than through found family and the comfort of finding others who understand you. The overwhelmingly vast majority of the game's runtime is spent deep in a mire of sadness (that read to me as almost comically over-the-top edgy at its worst points), and for a story that claimed to be about regeneration I wish there was more joy to be found here.

It also honestly just feels egregious to me that the primary gameplay mechanic of a story about a trans woman revolves around solving puzzles by choosing to amputate, immolate or just generally tear your body to pieces. This is problematic both because of how eerily reminiscent it feels of various TERF talking points (how they refer to gender-affirming surgeries as "mutilation"), and also because I don't want to be forced to hear our trans protagonist's leg bones crunch apart for the fiftieth time in the game. Trans people shouldn't be forced through the level of extreme pain this game asks of its protagonist just to be allowed to opportunity to finally heal, grow and be happy.

Higurashi is at its strongest when it is concerned with trauma, both on a personal and a communal level. When it understands the effects trauma can have on someone, and when it dearly wishes to find some way out of the cycles of violence that can so often cause traumatised individuals, groups and generations to, knowingly or unknowingly, condemn others to trauma also. Whilst these are words that don't always apply to Higurashi on a broader level, in its exploration of these themes Higurashi feels both mature and astute; there are so many moments when someone's reaction to the trauma they've experienced or are experiencing feels painfully, heartbreakingly, incisively on-point.

This element of Higurashi is so successful in part because Ryukishi has a deep empathy for his characters. He has an unwillingness to wholly discard someone for their misdeeds, and a deep desire to look inside people and see what makes them tick, what makes people choose the paths they do, and wants you to understand this also. There's one particular instance where I can't bring myself to be onboard with his hardline approach of "hate the sin and not the sinner", and this approach feels to me incongruous with the fact that there are characters in the story that are just wholly irredeemable (Satoko's uncle, for instance), but it's hard to deny there's something compelling about how much Ryukishi cares, and him asking you to try and care just a little bit more too.

Beyond all of this, Higurashi is concerned with generational divides, small village cultures on the edge of being wiped out by modernisation and a fury at the heartlessness of bureaucracy and how it leaves people to drown, with paranoia and fear and the kind of deep, unrelenting love that would have you tear apart everything for someone, with hope and despair and miracles. Higurashi is also concerned with friendship, and despite "the power of friendship" being one of the most worn out and uninspired themes for anime, manga and (I assume) visual novels it actually manages to make such a deeply impassioned plea towards this that I was just entirely hooked in by Higurashi's beating heart.

These are the highs of Higurashi, but it is also ultimately an often-uneven experience. There is a small amount of content here that is indefensible, and which I'm shocked I don't see more condemnation of. Basically any scene set in Angel Mort is just a lock to star creepy sexualisation of teenage girls played up for humour and treated as just completely acceptable, multiple side-character adults in the story make occasional creepy comments along these lines also, and a key character, Irie, is obsessed with the idea of putting one of the game's youngest characters in a maid outfit and marrying her. This content accounts for maybe 3% of the game if I had to guess, so a very minor amount, but it's all just wretched. It's so bizarre too because elsewhere Higurashi is able to render its women with remarkable depth, taking common character archetypes and ultimately subverting just about every expectation you enter with about them in ways that feel natural and which let you really understand how each character ticks by the end of the story, and yet despite this it just can't consistently Be Normal about them at all and just has to have its creepy moments. A couple of the Angel Mort scenes genuinely made me feel a bit ill to read and I would not blame someone for just refusing to read Higurashi because of this content.

More broadly, Higurashi is also desperately in need of a harsher editor at points. Higurashi's eight chapters combined are over one and a half million words long, or longer than reading the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy three times over, and took me 100 hours to finish (which I gather is faster than most people, even). During my readthrough I had multiple extended breaks, which is partially just that my life has been busy this past year, but partially that Higurashi has a habit of stretching out its slice-of-life scenes, confused metaphor-laden inner-monologues and moments of hopeless despair far beyond their point being effectively made. My final break from Higurashi lasted four months, only for me to discover upon my return that the final chapter, beyond a certain point, starts to descend into what feels at times like third-rate fanfiction, and it left me wishing that Ryukishi knew how to communicate his story a little bit more succinctly rather than stretching things on beyond the point where all the intrigue had been quelled and all the questions answered.

A mixed bag, then, but one with a lot to say and a lot it believes in, with an amazing sense of mystery, and some lovable characters that have a lot more going on that you first suspect. Wildly imperfect, at times exhausting or even just reprehensible, but fascinating and with a lot of heart behind its horror. I can't say that I would ever recommend Higurashi, but I did get a lot from the experience.

It's very strange that in a bunch of the toughest levels I completed in Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania it felt like controlling the camera was almost more important than controlling the stage itself, and it's also weird that the story mode will have large spikes in difficulty nested between other fairly straightforward levels; I found myself wishing the levels were reordered so that they had something better resembling a difficulty curve.

That said the game was a bunch of fun. I think the levels that require intense precision are not very interesting and can land on the bad side of frustrating (any level that asks you to go in a straight line down a very thin path falls into this), but the levels that demand you wrap your head around what the physics engine is doing, that ask you to iteratively form a plan and execute it well, or that just present a fun little idea to engage with, are generally a blast. In a few different instances during my story mode playthrough I would get stuck on a level for 10 or 15 minutes only to find finally completing it felt very rewarding and like all my hard work had finally clicked perfectly into place.

Katamari Damacy's controls are such a wonderful example of frictional game design. From a certain vantage-point controlling the katamari, a giant not-really-spherical mass of assorted objects, is almost undeniably clunky, awkward and a little bit of a struggle. Most of the time it will never do quite what you want it to, and on occasion things will even just go outright badly as you accidentally careen down a slope or manage to tightly lodge yourself in a not-quite-large-enough gap that you'll have to desperately wiggle out of.

I'm honestly surprised I don't see more people getting frustrated with this aspect of the game, and I have to confess that when I was starting to dive back into videogames a couple years ago I found how this game controls quite off-putting, enough so to be pretty ambivalent towards my experience with it. I was starting to explore the medium again, but from the perspective of a late-20s adult rather than the teenager I once was, and I simply hadn't had enough experiences with videogames at that point in time to really know how to cope with a one actively resisting your attempts to control it, that wouldn't just let you input what you wanted to have happen on a one-to-one basis, and for me at least that manifested in frustration. The fact that I return here two years later and find myself having so much love for this game is a great example about how our relationship with any individual artform is always evolving over time as we learn more and have a wider variety of experiences to draw from; that exact sense of friction and push-back that the game has that was so off-putting for me before now just seems crucial to the fun that can be found here.

The Prince, who finds himself rolling around these katamaris, is a rather small fellow, and remains largely a pretty similar size even as the katamaris grow wildly out of control across the course of the game; eventually he finds himself pushing something thousands of times larger than him. The most immediate upside of the frictional controls here, that sense of resistance, is how much it heightens the immersion of putting you in his shoes; you're not just pushing a ball around in a game, but you're very specifically playing as a small little guy who is going to struggle to keep this gigantic mass of stuff under control. The lack of control here just adds to the sense of weight and size and scale, and the movement growing ever-clumsier as the katamari amasses makes the game-feel translate to you how ridiculous what you're doing here is. The friction in the controls add a sense of serendipity too, the katamari is not a perfect sphere but a mass of random objects some of which jut out in weird ways making the collision so strange. Sometimes this works against you in often-funny ways, whilst other times a piece of debris you've collected will jut out against the ground just right to lift you up somewhere you shouldn't really be able to reach; either way serves to make the experience less routine and more memorable than if the katamari was just some easily-predictable-orb.

The best part of all of this is that once you're willing to make the leap to the notion that it's okay to not have perfect control over what's happening then the decisions you're faced with when you're playing become all the more engaging. Turning is slow, and even lining yourself up doesn't guarantee you'll actually go in a straight line, so sometimes you'll just want to jam the breaks on and start going in reverse; you won't be able to see where you're going as easily but you'll grab those objects behind you a lot faster provided you do hit them. Or do you want to take the time to stop, turn round, line yourself up, trading precious seconds for a bit more confidence that you'll actually grab the objects you're after? There's a middle point on this equation too, attempting to make these turns whilst on the move, but it's sufficiently finnicky to perform that this isn't just a free option; you get a nice mix of speed and accuracy here, but only if you can stop the katamari from slipping off in the wrong direction whilst you're doing this.

This lays out my varied experiences with the control scheme, and why I've turned around on the game so much, but of course there's a tremendous amount of joy in Katamari Damacy too which was clear to me even back when I wasn't as big a fan of the game but that lands more resoundingly now. I love how the game lets you continue playing a level even after the objective is completed, and how this means the reward for completing a level faster is that you get even more time to mess around in these spaces before the timer runs out. I love how the nature of the growth of the katamari, constantly needing increasingly bigger objects to meaningfully feed it, puts the emphasis on keeping moving rather than backtracking for any individual object you accidentally rolled past. I love the iterative level design of the main storyline, where later levels directly echo the earlier ones such that you already have some amount of familiarity with them from the get-go and a good idea of where the shortcuts are going to be. I love the bonus levels based around picking up the largest version of an animal you can find, and the pain that surges through you when you realise that yes that carton of milk counts as a cow, your run is now over, sorry-not-sorry. I love the affection that is shown here for people, all our oddities, our bizarre societal rituals, our cultures and passions and humble existences, and how even in the game's quiet critique of consumerism it never lets go of this affection for us. I love just how gentle all of this is, even as your katamari goes about tearing down whole civilisations, and how even amidst the chaos on display the game manages to be relaxing and comforting.

Legends: Arceus is incredibly fortunate that it's a Pokémon game, as there's a lot here that would be nearly unforgivable in any other context.

The story has some nice moments, and a handful of enjoyable characters, but is achingly plodding, tedious in its repetitions, and ultimately overstays its welcome. The core gameplay loop often feels like it amounts to little more than making numbers go up and ticking boxes. The boss fights were actually pretty enjoyable to me just because they broke up the core gameplay loop, but they do amount to an E-Grade Souls rip-off with some pretty bad game-feel. In general I think game-feel is something Legends: Arceus really struggles with, especially when this aspect collides headlong into some of the ways where the game feels unfinished (attempting to traverse hills and edges of terrain makes this really obvious).

The game also feels like it is suffering a bit of an identity crisis at times; a common occurrence for the first half of the runtime is that you'll end up in a battle with some story character, you'll have six monsters to their one or two meaning you can never really lose no matter what happens, and then as soon as you win your party is healed for you. It's like they didn't want the trainer battles to define the game, but were too scared to move away from them to a more dramatic extent in case the lack of them might disappoint long-time fans.

Easily the most damning problem though, and the one I really can't shake, is the world design. These environments are just so lifeless, so lacking in intrigue. Big, bland, bumpy, and ultimately distractingly ugly, expanses that exist solely to plonk down critters upon. If you removed the Pokémon themselves from the equation it's hard to imagine people actually wanting to exist in these spaces, or having any real desire to explore them.

Legends Arceus has a lot wrong with it, and yet despite this it is still a Pokémon game and this does some serious heavy lifting in its favour. Despite all my many complaints, sometimes you just see the most perfect, adorable little critter wandering around in the wild, you crouch down in the grass to try and sneak up on it, and in that moment it's hard to harbour any ill-will against what's going on here. Pokémon has always been a franchise that carries with it an incredible amount of charm and the best moments in Legends Arceus are the ones where that charm shines through, and for all the game's faults I was left smiling more than this review might suggest just because it's hard to feel too bad when you get to spend your time vibing around all these lovely monster-friends.

Looking back at it I'm kind of shocked at the praise this game received upon its release. Both the controls and the physics involved are incredibly finnicky on multiple levels, the puzzles are largely not interesting, and the game is aesthetically on-par with a mid-tier Newgrounds game.

Generally I try to avoid rating games I've not played for close to a decade, but a streamer I love was playing through this and I was kind of taken aback both by how much worse the game seemed than my apathetic memory of it, and by how much the streamer was also finding the game often-miserable.

One of my favourite traits of Fromsoft's work on their assorted Souls games is their ability to make worlds feel larger than they actually are. The way these games will have you be able to visually see in the distance places you will reach over ten hours in the future, or looking back and seeing where you journeyed from and feeling so small compared to this world around you. How the very existence of illusory walls makes it feel like there could be a secret hiding basically anywhere. Huge chunks of content being hidden in compelling, obtuse or even outright bizarre ways, with no concern for the notion of players missing out on literal entire regions or multiple major boss fights as a result, leading both to excitement and surprise when you manage to stumble upon these secrets or figure them out on your own, and to those amazing moments where you get to share discoveries with others or learn from them, the game repeatedly opening up to be even bigger and more mysterious somehow. I typically don't love the npc quests in these games but even those, with their habit of careening off-course as if some player's unfortunate choices unknowingly ruined their dungeon master's plans, make the world feel somehow larger than you and beyond your strict control.

This is also why I think lore videos for these games have ended up coming awfully close to just being their own miniature industry. You're always playing as someone showing up long after the main event has already concluded, with the history of these worlds and characters being something spoken of in riddles and hidden in item descriptions of the relics you find, etched into the environment around you. You have to piece together what happened to get the world to this state from incomplete information, often with the gaps leaving things up to player interpretation. Yet again this all leads to you feeling very small, and the world around you feeling incomprehensibly large with a history so rich that someone as inconsequential as some random undead/hunter/unkindled can't possibly hope to fully grasp all it.

A lot of this would be considered by many to go against a lot of principles of Industry Standard Good Game Design™, but the sum total of it is game worlds that become just endlessly fascinating and evocative to the people they connect with; it turns out designing games is a lot more than just fulfilling a bunch of heuristics on how games and narratives should look, and FromSoft's holistic approach to how the design and lore of these worlds interact with their mechanics is such a great example of this.

This is the environment into which Elden Ring is born. On the one hand an open world game feels almost inevitable in some sense; FromSoft has spent so much time designing game worlds that have their first priority set as making you feel miniscule contrasted with your environment, the player often feeling like a footnote in a long and storied history, and so going ahead and making these feelings come a bit less from smoke and mirrors and a bit more from something literal feels like, at the very least, something they must have been curious to experiment with ever since the original Dark Souls' deeply interlinked, almost Metroidvania-esque map design. On the other hand, isn't it a bit redundant? If they're already instilling these emotions in people what is there to gain from actual, physical vastness, and wildly excessive runtimes, and aren't there just too many costs involved in pushing your game to be this large? This forms the central conflict at the heart of Elden Ring's existence, and whilst I do largely have a lot of fondness for this game, laying out the conflict in this manner makes it very easy both to see why some people are so besotted with Elden Ring, and also to see why others feel like FromSoft jumped the shark here compared to their previous work. Towering, spectacular, intoxicating ambition meets the awkward reality of trying to make that sense of scale be something rendered so literally in a world where realising that takes unfathomable hours of labour.

If you had asked me what I thought of Elden Ring 30 hours into my playthrough I would have said it felt like one of the best games I'd ever played, and that I was anticipating the possible reality where it ends up becoming my favourite FromSoft game. This opening act for me was frankly magical, and really shows what FromSoft can bring to open world games as they apply many of the principles that they approached their previous Souls games with but on a grander scale. I'm going to avoid explicit spoilers here and make oblique references instead, but the manner in which I first discovered Caelid and Leyndell, how you are shown Siofra, and interacting with The Four Belfries for the first time, all rank as some of my favourite moments in gaming as multiple different tricks are taken advantage of, that follow through on FromSoft's usual strategies but writ unthinkably large, to impart a sense of scale, wonder, curiosity and awe on the player. Combine these tricks with how rich these environments are to explore, the handcrafted element that even the various catacombs or caves had to them, and the ways in which, in stark contrast with other open world games, ticking off lists and markers is heavily de-emphasised in favour of advocating for intrinsic motivation and player agency being much greater focal points of your journey, and I found exploring the Lands Between simply enchanting.

If you had asked me what I thought of Elden Ring 60 hours into my playthrough I would have said it was a really great game, but one that is not without sizable flaws. This is the point at which the cracks start to show as the sad reality of trying to make any open world game is you're going to need to re-use a lot of content to make that achievable. The Erdtree Avatar fight that I'd really enjoyed several hours into my playthrough had been repeated to the point where it had become mundane, the wriggly Tree Spirit I'd found in Stormveil Castle that really wasn't very fun to fight but was still interesting because it was a fairly unique encounter was, apparently, nowhere even close to being a unique encounter, and almost any boss that I found in a catacomb or cave would end up being dredged up again, sometimes multiple times, sometimes even as a normal mob enemy. Even some of the wonderful early-game surprises become diluted a bit as they're repeated, the recurrence of the walking mausoleum being the saddest example to me. The crafting system, that I touched only a handful of times in my entire playthrough, is very much a symptom of the open world format too; you need something you can scatter around the world for players to pick up, some reason for them to jump to that hard to reach ledge, but you can only put so many runes and swords and hats in the game so crafting materials start to seem like a necessity and yet it's hard to say that they really add anything to the game except more menus and a slight pang of disappointment when you finally fight your way to that shiny purple item and it turns out it's just another Arteria Leaf.

Despite this I understand that these design decisions are largely just a necessity in a game this large, and outside of them the game was a really great time for me at this point in my playthrough. Exploring was still lots of fun and whilst the exciting moments of discovery had become a bit less frequent they were still there, often delightful, and the quieter, emptier moments found in areas like the Altus Plateau made for a sense of palpable loneliness that served the game well. Build variety felt the best it ever has to the point where I was toying with the idea of a second playthrough later this year. Ranni's and Fia's questlines were very compelling to me, emotionally, narratively and in terms of the physical journeys they involve, and are among the highlights of the game. The bosses felt like a clear step down in quality from Dark Souls 3, but there were a handful of fights that were still really enjoyable to me in different ways, and the game has a great sense of spectacle that sold even some of its overwise more uneven fights.

By far the most impressive portion of the game at this point were its legacy dungeons though. Even the weakest ones among these are still largely fantastic, and the level design in the two highlights, Stormveil Castle and Leyndell, is among the finest work FromSoft has ever done; packed with secrets to an almost ludicrous extent, constantly looping back in on themselves in really cool ways, and with great encounter design throughout. I adored these portions of the game, but I could never fully shake the notion from my head that if the very best portions of this game are the bits that are contained to a single zone then why exactly is it open world?

Sadly, this is where things start to really drop off for me. My playthrough landed at a little over 90 hours and I'm honestly a little exhausted? Leyndell was the highlight of the game for me, and after this area was complete I was very satisfied with my experience and honestly pretty ready for the game to end soon but it just kept going.

A part of the problem here is that I'm not convinced a game like this was ever meant to be this long; the various Souls design tropes that are very entertaining in a shorter game start to wear thin when you're seeing an enemy with their back to you mournfully looking at an item on the ground for the 25th time. A part of this too is that reused content was starting to rear its head to an absurd extent; a beloved enemy type that I was thrilled to see be brought back and placed in a tonally appropriate area earlier in the game would go on to reappear a few more times in areas much less fitting to it, earlier enemies in general just get brought back far too much (the hands are a great example of this; I adored their first appearance and how well suited they were to that locale, and every appearance since felt like the game was just struggling to know what to fill the environments with), Erdtree Avatars, dragons and Tree Spirits showing up yet again would just start prompting eyerolls from me, even a storyline boss from earlier in the game could be found roaming out in the wild in multiple different places. In possibly the most insulting example a secret boss from earlier in the game, that felt very important from a lore perspective and which was very visually unique and impressive, ends up reappearing as the final boss of an otherwise inconsequential cave. This is the sad reality of trying to make a game this literally vast instead of simply instilling a sense of vastness.

Despite all of this I think I would still have mostly been onboard with the late-game stretch, or would have at least been more forgiving towards it, if all the bosses after you leave Leyndell didn't just...kind of suck? There are far too many ridiculous AoE attacks with some bosses having a few different variations of these, shockwave attacks that hit on multiple different frames and so feel very janky and unintuitive to dodge, ridiculous combo attack strings that would appear a couple times per game previously become the norm now instead, every boss had multiple attacks with ridiculous wind-ups (again, a thing that was used but sparingly so in previous games) to the point that fights feel weirdly disjointed and impossible to sight read, multiple bosses are placed in the same arena without any real concern for how these are going to interact with one another, windows to get in attacks are narrowed to the bare minimum especially for anyone who wants to play the game purely melee, and there are a handful of bosses that are gigantic to the point where you can only see their feet as you slash at them oblivious to whatever is actually happening. In two different cases with these oversized bosses I felt like I spent as much time charging across the arena to reach them whenever they ran away as I did actually engaging in combat.

Many of these late-game bosses are just not fun, poorly designed, and beating them for me felt less like I learnt the fight and played it well and more like I just got lucky and rng landed correctly. Even that exciting feeling of how much build variety the game had started to slip away at this point; the late-game requires that your build be incredibly powerful and severely limits what things are viable as a result. Maybe this is just a case of FromSoft just misbalancing things or having an off-day, a bunch of the bosses in Dark Souls 2 are very disappointing too so it's not like this is a first, but I think this is actually the final, and most frustrating, manifestation of the downsides of open world games. It's so hard to keep one-upping yourself over the course of a 90 hour playtime, in a game with a colossal number of boss fights, that the only way you can guarantee the bosses become even more spectacular is to start pushing them in the direction where they also start to feel unfair too, and with how big the game is leading to there being so much game to test it's easy to believe that maybe these bosses just weren't given as much playtesting as they should have as a result.

I see everyone talking about how Elden Ring refined open world games and is going to change them for years to come and whilst I do think there are a bunch of elements of Elden Ring's approach to the quasi-genre that make for a more satisfying, rewarding, and less cloying experience than what you'd find elsewhere, I think ultimately it made me feel like the best thing this game could do for open world games is convince more developers to just make tighter, more refined experiences instead.

I wouldn't blame someone for being just completely turned off of Elden Ring by these problems that crop up in this final stretch. It left a really sour taste in my mouth at points, even in between moments of still genuinely enchanting imagery and art direction. Ultimately though I really loved so much of my experience with Elden Ring in its earlier hours, and there are many moments from this game that will stick with me for a long time, so despite its fairly severe flaws I can't help but find a lot of love in my heart for it regardless. Elden Ring is a display both of the reasons I love FromSoft's approach to game development, and of why I hope they never make another open world game again.

As someone who hadn't played a Monster Hunter game in almost ten years, Monster Hunter Rise came as a bit of a surprise when I started playing it. There is a far reduced sense of friction here; gone are the days of making sure you're prepared for the environment you're entering and its extreme heat or cold, wandering around trying to find your prey, having to be careful to paintball them so you can keep tracking them down when they flee mid-battle.

I can't really think of this direction for the series as better or worse, it's more just different? The biggest things lost with this change in direction are that you form less of a connection with the game's environments (which are wonderful, and a delight to exist in) when you can just zip right to the monster the moment you start the mission, and you're also just far less encouraged to think through your preparation for battle when the game's actual focus is on getting you into the action as fast as possible. This latter point is something that isn't helped by Rise being not-particularly-challenging generally and so not punishing this lack of preparation; I played the vast majority of the game using the exact same item loadout, eating the exact same dango meal, and never feeling like I needed to change these habits in any way.

Whilst there's clearly something lost here, there's also a lot gained as Rise is able to lean harder into the action and excitement. Once you've entered the monster's locale you're never more than a minute or two from battle as you swing through the air, run up walls and drift on your dog around corners to get to where your target is as soon as possible. You can ride the monsters, smashing them against each other for different item drops, and when monsters run away it's so easy to catch up with them that it mainly just acts as a momentary reprieve to sharpen your weapon. I do think Rise can at times blur together a little bit - being able to charge towards a monster right away, the fight never really letting up, every mission starting the same way with you catching a monster or two early on with your wirebug attacks to slam them into one another - but the more action-focused approach makes for an exciting time, and I had a lot of fun moving up the ranks fighting alongside my girlfriend.

Outside of these changes, it's still very much Monster Hunter. There are still many, many systems, starting the game is a horrorshow of tutorial pop-up messages you'll immediately forget, and it's hard for me to figure out how much training my pets or sending out meowcenaries to go add to the ever growing pile of random-monster-pieces really ended up mattering in the end, but the moments in the village still mostly make for chill vibes once you wrap your head around this portion of the gameplay loop.

Other random thoughts;
- I love riding the dogs and wish they didn't feel just much worse than the cats outside of the convenience they offer
- Spiribirds suck as a mechanic and seem like the way the game is encouraging you to actually do some exploration ever but the reality is they actually force you to choose between running around a loop for a few minutes before battle to pick them up and actually be fully powered or entering battle without them knowing that you could be stronger
- Despite the fact I only played as a hammer-wielder all game long the sheer variety of weapons here continues to rule and be one of Monster Hunter's greatest strengths and really adds to the multiplayer experience when all the different playstyles start interacting in cool ways
- I think the multiplayer experience in Rise is just generally better than playing alone, but this is particularly emphasised with the handful of rampage quests which are quite unfun on your own but become very chaotic but really exciting and tense when you're coordinating them with a friend
- For the most part the monsters here are fantastic, a lot of them feel unique and compelling, turf wars are spectacular, and a special shoutout to Magnamalo who is anime as hell and easily my favourite monster to fight
- The story and dialogue are Quite Bad. I'm someone who will read almost every line of dialogue in games and even I found myself not bothering to read almost anything here after a certain point
- I love everything about the wirebug mechanic; the range of movement they offer, how fun wirebug attacks are, managing your wirebugs to make sure you can escape quickly if you're knocked down, it's all great
- The final fight of HR7, also the final fight of the main story content, was very exciting and a clear high-point of my time with the game

All said and done I played for about 50 hours, got to HR11, beat the main bulk of the story stuff, and whilst I think it's likely I play a bit more Monster Hunter Rise I'm definitely not invested in pouring in tens of hours of grind against the same monsters over and over to see a couple extra pieces of content or to get some slightly better armour so I am mostly done I think outside of the occasional multiplayer session with friends. Had a blast.

If a game could ever sell itself to me on charm alone it might just be this one. Even two decades after its release, and with so many games taking inspiration from the game's aesthetic, Wind Waker still feels like a breath of fresh air to play. The cel-shading here allows for an expressiveness that it feels like The Legend of Zelda had been trying to reach for for years, whilst making the series' tendency to bizarre character designs land in a much more consistently endearing manner than the previous entries. Even many of the stock enemies are just adorable in this game, from doggo darknuts to toucan wizzrobes. The game's soundtrack is also just incredible, helping make the game just have such good vibes to it; even during the Wind Waker's lulls it still largely manages to present spaces that are just so nice to exist in because of how all these elements come together.

The narrative aspects here feel very underrated to me; I hardly ever hear Wind Waker complimented in this regard, but gosh. Granted I think the Zelda series' ability to bring out striking moments of emotionality just generally goes undermentioned, but in my release order playthrough of the series Wind Waker may be the high-point so far in this regard. Moreso than how Link's Awakening gradually makes you accept that you'll have to let go, than the longing found at the heart of Ocarina of Time's exploration of the intersection of nostalgia and growing up, than how Majora's Mask stares oblivion and failure in the face, somehow Wind Waker's much simpler coming of age tale, told through the love you have for your family and friends, within the framework of an even heightened focus on the interweaving of history and legends, just hits perfectly for me with seemingly every story beat managing to land either in terms of emotion or humour. It helps that this is the first Zelda game to actually put work into making Zelda and Ganondorf feel like actual characters instead of just symbols, I just love both their characterisations a ton.

The actual gameplay of Wind Waker is where the game falls a bit short. I remember playing this game as a teenager and dropping it during the Triforce shard fetch-quest when the sailing was really starting to drag for me. The remake does a lot to help in this regard; the swift sail makes getting around much smoother, and the Triforce shard fetch-quest is significantly truncated to the point where it's actually genuinely fine. Even then by the time I had finished my recent playthrough I was still mostly done with the sailing, the initial joy starting to disappear as your map becomes largely filled in and the lack of variety in mid-sailing occurrences becomes increasingly apparent. Still it's worth it for those early highs of having the map open up to you, discovering all these weird and mysterious islands and piecing together how you're going to access their secrets later on, this portion of the game really is a blast and some of the most fun you can have with a Zelda game.

The dungeon design is less annoying than Majora's Mask, but largely unmemorable and run-of-the-mill, and whilst I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a game being easy, Wind Waker is markedly so to the point where I would find myself just spamming sword attacks against enemies, accepting I was going to be damaged in the process, because the damage I was taking was just meaningless, throwing strategy out the window because the game couldn't really punish the fact that not thinking through your approach is just faster. At this point in the series sword combat was one of the weakest elements of the 3D Zelda entries, but due to the warped incentives brought by the non-existent difficulty this is the first time that the sword combat has seriously drifted into mindlessness for me.

I may sound harsh at points, but very little of this truly bothered me. The vibes really are just that good that they easily carry the game through its weaker moments, and whilst Wind Waker is certainly far from perfect it has become one of my favourite Zelda games during this return to it.

The conclusion to Odyssey's story is easily my favourite moment in any Mario game I've played, an incredibly creative, exciting love-letter to the franchise that also acts as the perfect culmination of what the game had been building towards. I don't love Super Mario Odyssey, but the very best moments in it really are excellent when the game is focused on throwing cool new ideas at you one after another. Odyssey also arguably controls the best of any of the 3D Mario games I've played, though the cap-bounce has a habit of making a lot of your move-set feel redundant and you have to nurse the camera a lot more than the control scheme can really accommodate for.

Despite all of this, wow does all the filler drag on me. Of the 999 power moons in the game I'd guess that over three-quarters of them are either inane (just sitting there out in the open, hiding inside random rocks, for purchase in stores, talking to some random npc), frustrating, or copy-pastes of moons you've already collected. There is just far too much content in this game, and far too much of it kind of just sucks. This is mostly fine throughout the main story where there's no need to return to a world once you're done there and the moon counts needed to advance are fairly tame, but the post-game started to really get to me towards the end of my 500 moon playthrough. It's hard not to feel like this game, whilst still good, is a bit of a casualty of the belief that if a game is bigger that must mean it is better.

Disappointing. My initial feelings on Ritual of the Night were quite positive; starting aboard a ship in the midst of a storm made for a striking opening, the rpg systems seemed to have a decent amount of promise, and I loved the 2.5d graphical style here which created some really cool scenes.

It all just kind of fell apart the longer I played for though. Most of the rpg systems ended up either not being fleshed out enough, or more pressingly being a pain to actually engage with properly because of how much grinding for obscure item-drops they require. The story is a mess, and getting anything other than the worst ending will almost certainly require a guide due to excessively obscure progression checks. The last few regions in the game also felt like a significant downgrade in quality, with Den of Behemoths being easily the low-point. The balancing also felt off to me, which isn't surprising considering how much customisability there is but it was fairly trivial for me to turn one of the first spells in the game into something that just shredded every non-boss enemy (and most of the bosses, too) in the entire game.

It's sad as I really wanted to like this more. The variety of powers and subsequent character customisation is exciting, the game world is vast and varied, and the first half of the game features multiple really sweet moments with my personal highlight likely being the Twin Dragons fight. Ultimately the game did not stick the landing for me though, and ended up being just another fine, solidly enjoyable Metroidvania.

On a different note, I played the Switch port as it was what was available to me and strongly recommend people who want to play the game do it with a version of the game other than this one. I didn't let this experience alter my rating as I recognise most releases of the game likely don't have this issue, but the game did outright crash three times during my playthrough, setting me back to my most recent save room in the process, which is as frustrating as it sounds.