Small disclaimer: I am only marking my playthrough of Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition as completed because I did technically see an ending. After beating Orochi X in Chapter 4 of the Story Mode, you get a cutscene meant to signify the end and the credits start to roll. I imagine this is how the original game ends, but, of course, Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition is an expanded rerelease, so they have plenty more content and story to go through after the original ending. I plan on playing through at least most of that content since I unlocked Chapter 5 shortly after typing this review, but I feel I have experienced enough to review the game. All of that being said, here is my review.

So, Warriors Orochi is a Musou series that I have never actually tried until my time playing this game on Steam. I'm also very surprised I have not given this series a look before since I really enjoy both Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors, which this game heavily features a crossover between. It serves as a crossover between Koei Tecmo IPs in general, too, with characters like Ryu Hayabusa from Ninja Gaiden and Ayane from Dead or Alive popping up to join your ranks of playable characters. You have to unlock the characters over time by completing missions in Story Mode, but this game has 140+ characters and that's just insane. With a game that has that many characters, you'd think leveling them all might be a pain, but the developers must have thought to give players a helping hand since Growth Points exist. Simply distribute some points to the characters you want to level up in the dedicated menu for it and watch those levels soar. Unfortunately, some characters have the same weapons, but I found that most of the characters have original move-sets. I enjoyed experimenting with the characters every time I unlocked them; although I have not unlocked everyone, I did get my hands on most of the characters. I genuinely think that the roster is probably the best part about this game. I actually got a nice blast of nostalgia since a lot of the Samurai Warriors characters play pretty much exactly the same as they do in Samurai Warriors 2 Xtreme Legends, which was my childhood Musou game alongside Dynasty Warriors 6. Every character has a good amount of costumes and, as far as I know, this version of the game has most of the DLC costumes. I was particularly happy to see that nearly every samurai that was in SW2XL has their alternate costumes from that game to use here and so do the characters that were in DW6, but the primary designs for the characters used in things like their portraits in dialogue come from SW3 and DW7. I found myself pleasantly surprised with the guest characters. Ryu Hayabusa was one of my most played characters, as I expected, but I also really liked Nemea even though I don't even know what game he comes from. Other fun guest characters are here, too, like Achilles (I think he's from another Koei Tecmo IP), some anime-looking knight called Sterkenburg Cranach (I heard he's from Atelier but I dunno if that's true), and Sophitia from Soul Calibur. The game also has a good amount of what seems to be original characters to me, though they may have been in other Musou games that I just haven't played. These include the likes of Kaguya, Susano-o, Sun Wukong, Nezha, Kiyomori Taira, and plenty more. I found them to be a fun addition, even if you don't unlock a good chunk of these guys until way later in the game from the looks of things. My most played characters in this game were probably Ryu Hayabusa, Hanzo Hattori, Masamune Date, and Dong Zhuo. I actually used a somewhat varied selection of characters - I had a decently leveled Hideyoshi Toyotomi, Nobunaga Oda, Katsuie Shibata, Zhang He, Zhou Tai, Kotaro Fuma, Sterkenburg, and Nemea - but this list includes the characters I remember playing the most (as far as I could tell, there's no way to directly see who you played more). By the end of the story mode, my go-to team consisted of Ryu Hayabusa, Dong Zhuo, and Hanzo Hattori. They were all in the Level 70 - 80 range and my frugalness with Growth Points has resulted in me having a huge surplus of it, way more than I think I could ever spend. Once I pick the game up again to play through the rest of the story, I plan on trying out more characters to see if anyone else is as fun to play to me as my current go-to team.

As far as gameplay goes, I found that Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition is a fairly standard Musou experience. You're there to kill thousands of faceless goons, complete objectives to gain advantage in the battlefield, level up to get even stronger, earn powerful new weapons from the lambs of your slaughter, and just absolutely decimate anyone that dares to get in your way. Musou games tend to share a very repetitive formula, which is highly critiqued (and I understand why), but for some reason I almost never get tired of it when I grab a new Musou game. I think that the main way this game distinguishes itself from the rest is through its focus on team composition. In every battle, you pick three characters you can swap between at any time. The three fighters all have their own health and Musou bars, so you can swap to the next one if you're getting low or you want a quick and easy Musou attack. Characters regain health and Musou when you're not playing them. Pressing down on the D-Pad summons all three and they can help you out in fights, but definitely the main point of this feature to me is the team Musou attack that can be done if all of your characters have max Musou bar. You have some special moves you can perform through pressing the R button using some of your Musou up, which I think is a new thing but I really don't know if it is or not. Also, one small quirk with the game that's probably worth mentioning is that the Samurai Warriors characters (and some of the guest characters) have to hold the button to use their Musous, but the Dynasty Warriors characters (and some of the guest characters again) use it as soon as you press the button once. This was something I did not realize until looking it up, so I just assumed Samurai Warriors characters did not have Musou attacks until I saw I was doing it wrong. Kind of silly in retrospect considering that this game only does that because the Samurai Warriors games also have you hold the button down to do Musou attacks. The last noteworthy thing this game does differently from the Musou games I've played in my opinion is through its classifications of characters. Every character is under a specific type: Attack, Speed, Technique, and Wonder. As far as I could tell, these don't really change the way you play much, but the types do have their own special thing about them. Power types basically get super armor so no regular attack will make them flinch, Speed types get a double jump, and Wonder types can dash in the middle of their attacks by using a tiny bit of their Musou bar. I couldn't figure out what the special ability of Technique types is (if they even have one). I like these classifications, but they look more important than they actually are. For example, you'd think Power characters have stronger weapons, but that's not always true.

When playing Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate, Medium difficulty is the default I went for with all required story missions until I reached Chapter 4. When your characters get to around Level 30 or 40, the levels become way too easy on Medium difficulty, and by the time I got to Chapter 4's main story missions (after doing all the side missions of the other chapters) my main group of characters were around Level 70. I also got the strongest weapons - the special Mystic weapons, only obtained once by fulfilling special criteria in a specific mission - for two out of the three characters, so my team was plowing through bosses in Medium difficulty with just two or three hits. Naturally, Hard became my new default difficulty for Chapter 4 and beyond, which really isn't very difficult either with how strong my go-to team was. Before starting Chapter 4, I only changed the difficulty when I wanted to go on Easy difficulty to quickly finish the first level several times (I did this because raising bonds requires you to play a level to see the bond increase and it would feel like a waste of time not doing it on Easy imo) or when I needed to go on Hard difficulty to unlock the faster horse and the Mystic Weapons for my most played characters. Once I get to playing through Chapter 5 up to Chapter 8, I will likely try turning the difficulty up to the second most difficult option (Chaos) once I get to playing through Chapter 5. The difficulty feels like more of a level curve thing than actually making the game harder for you.

The story of this game felt rather unimportant to me, but that's not to discredit the tons of effort put into it through things like cutscenes and a metric shitload of dialogue. In fact, there's a lot of focus put on the story; I'm just not really looking for a great story when I'm playing a Musou game, so its inclusion is nice but inconsequential for me (and its still not all that great). You start off as Sima Zhao, Ma Chao, and Hanbei Takenaka fighting against a demon army and a huge hydra. The characters soon realize that they are completely powerless against it and try to retreat. They nearly die trying, but a woman from the Mystic Realm comes to save them. She reveals that her name is Kaguya (I believe that comes from a Japanese myth but I couldn't tell you about that) and she has the power to go back in time using the memories of people that were there. They use her power to wind the clock back to a time before the hydra attacked. The goal is to amass an army of the strongest warriors in the land to take down the hydra with. You learn more about the hydra, the godlike beings of the Mystic Realm, and other important characters like the trickster spirit Da Ji and Orochi himself later down the storyline, but in the beginning you don't really know who these people (or beasts) are. Basically, the entire game after the prologue mission is going through battlegrounds to fight some dudes either to recruit them or because they're in your way, and honestly I wouldn't have it any other way. The motivation for the characters tends to be at least a little different depending on who it is, but a lot of them either join because they got captured, want to go back in time to save someone (or correct a mistake of theirs), or they join the army for the greater good. A lot of stuff happens - typically within missions themselves - and there are a few fun twists and turns. I liked how, in the end of Chapter 2, everyone in your army is essentially left with no choice but to trust Da Ji's plan of using her own memories to go back even further in time. I think it would have been interesting if we saw a more good side to Da Ji through this, especially since there's a character that is unshakably loyal to her, but unfortunately she is just evil and using the army to revive Orochi. Maybe that's explored more after Chapter 5, I don't know. Nonetheless, the story does ultimately (heh) feel more like set-dressing for the sake of an epic scale to me. For the most part, I saw the story as just a way to add flavor to the missions, make you feel more invested in the characters, and give them reasons to fight each other. The funny thing about the latter point is that a lot of characters just kinda act like they know each other already, although the dialogue between characters highly suggests that this is because WO3U is a sequel to the other games. I wouldn't know because I haven't played those games. Still, its amusing how Achilles can threaten to take his opponents to Hades while fighting alongside fantasy ninjas, magic ninjas, samurais, magic samurais, warriors with weird weapons, sorcerers, Yōkai, demons, Oni, and gods from Taoist, Buddhist, and Shinto stories.

In the Story Mode, you get a base that serves as a small hub you go to after beating missions. Characters show up in the base depending on what mission you beat or what characters you're playing and you can talk to them. This either leads to fun banter between characters, discussions of what happened in the mission you just did, or a conversation that will unlock a new mission for you. Unfortunately I found that a good chunk of missions are only attainable through talking with characters, so sometimes there's a pressure to talk to everyone you see and keep swapping between characters to find the right one for unlocking a mission. I'm no completionist for most games I play, but I did still talk to everyone in the camp when I could and often swapped characters just to see if any of them made a new mission show up. I found that most of what I did in the hub was fuse weapons or buy new ones from the Blacksmith. With the sheer number of characters that are in this game, I liked to micromanage them all and make sure they all had decent weapons, even the ones I didn't play once. One feature that annoyed me about the camp in this game is the bond system, which a good amount of missions are locked to. The bond system is just a few gauges that represent a character's relationship with other characters. You have to have the character your playing talk to another to start a bond, then raise it through various ways. The easiest way is to host tea parties by talking to the dedicated tea shop guy and going through some menus. Don't even bother with the bond system until you get moon viewings (the most expensive tea party option), it will save you a lot of headache. Once you get that, you just dump some of the in-game currency into two or three moon viewings for the characters that need the bond, then play a mission with them all in your party and you can unlock the mission. This whole system is more of a minor nuisance to me than anything, but it was something I was often wondering how I would ever raise until I looked it up online and found out that its a pain in the neck to raise bonds before you get the moon viewings. It felt pointless to me overall, yet characters and missions are locked behind it. I would have preferred not having to keep playing the first level on Easy difficulty with all these characters since it felt like a waste of time to me.

To be frank, I really did not think I would have a lot to say about this game, but of course its nearly impossible for me to write a short cohesive review on this site. I give Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition four stars. I really enjoyed my time with it and I see why people say its one of the best Musou games out there.

After seeing the recent surge in Wario Land inspired indies - mainly Pizza Tower (which I'm interested in playing sometime soon) and ANTONBLAST - I had a newfound intrigue in playing through these games. I've long heard about how fun and charming they are, but I didn't care much for checking them out until hearing the explosion of praise they're getting as of recent. Of course, I typically try to start from the very beginning when I start a new series, so naturally I began with this one. Thankfully, I was able to snag the whole quadrilogy before the 3DS + Wii U eShop died. Took me some time to beat this one, but its a Game Boy platformer so its not very long. I tried to use as few Restore Points as I could: I beat every level without it, but frankly the last few boss fights were pretty irritating so I used them just to save me the headache. Sorry if that makes me a fake gamer to you, I guess.

I'll jump straight into the gameplay. Wario Land feels like a pretty good successor to the Mario Land series, having the same basic structure as SML2 but shaking things up in a neat way through some of Wario's unique characteristics and a different gameplay focus. Wario has his signature shoulder bash, which has him running forward and knocking out whatever enemy he hits unless they have a weapon in front of them. You get a coin whenever you defeat an enemy with the shoulder bash. He can also pick up enemies and toss them around; if you really want to, you can just throw them around forever and they won't recover, but they only die if you toss them into a hazard (lava, bottomless pit, spikes, etc.) or if you...lodge them into blocks? Yea sometimes when you throw an enemy they just get stuck inside blocks and die that way. The goal in Wario Land is a little different from Mario Land. You're still getting to the end of each level, but, rather than that being the only real focus, Wario Land has you slow down a tad to focus on getting as many coins as you can. There's a bit more of a focus on exploration, with a bunch of treasures you can find (treasure hunting is far from my strong suit though so I only found two of them) and a coin counter that builds up as you gain more wealth. In replacement of the coins usual function of giving you lives, there are hearts you grab that give you a 1-Up when you get 100 of them. I think the focus change is a neat idea and it fits very well with Wario's character, but ultimately didn't feel too impactful or purposeful until literally the very end when your wealth determines what house the Genie gives to Wario. I got the birdhouse - the worst option - because of course I did. I died a lot, and lemme tell you, it's hard to make any bread when you're dying. If I had something to complain about with the gameplay, its that something about it just feels awkward. I'm not sure how to really describe exactly what it is, so instead I'll mention specific complaints. Wario's jumps are very floaty, but there were many times I thought I could go far enough to cross a gap and just couldn't. Usually, you have your dash to help you with going farther, but, when you don't, there are certain sections of the game where you pretty much just have to die and start again since Wario can't dash when he's small and you need to dash at certain parts. This also makes that dragon powerup feel like something you would never actually want because it replaces your dash with the fire breath. Grabbing enemies felt pretty janky to me, there's a few times where Wario just stopped in his tracks and didn't move when I was moving. There's this ghost enemy that functions like a Boo in that it only moves when you turn around, but you can jump on it too and I swear that was so awkward to finagle with. Especially annoying because there's a ghost boss where you need to jump on those ghosts to beat the boss. Any boss where you had to grab something and throw it at them was awful because of how janky the throwing feels. The physics are also just really odd and it can make taking out any enemy that moves around in the air an absolute pain in the neck. Overall I think this set a good precedent for the other Wario Land games, assuming they build off of what this one made, but it does feel pretty clumsy and odd. Surprisingly pretty difficult, too.

There's basically no story at all, so I'm completely skipping the section I'd usually dedicate to that and instead going to aesthetics. Wario Land seems to be very much going for a zany weird style. The Mario Land games were already pretty goofy, so, in my opinion, it only made sense to make the next game in the series make use of one of the Mario series most wacky characters. Wario was even invented by the Mario Land series, so its fitting to have him take the reigns. The music especially goes for a silly goofy sound, with none of it sounding particularly great on its own and rather just existing to elevate the mood. The worlds all have some kind of food related puns in the name (Rice Beach, Mt. Teapot, etc.) and the level design itself usually includes some weird looking enemies that have very expressive cartoony death animations. I think this is pretty neat.

Overall, I don't think Wario Land is all that spectacular, but it has some fun ideas despite its jankiness. It was decently fun to play through and it does have a good amount of content (about 40 levels and 5 bosses if I remember correctly). You might enjoy it more if you're all about finding secret collectibles; I'm not really a treasure hunting fiend myself so I don't mind being stuck with the silly "bad ending". Wario Land gets an alright 3 stars out of me, the game is far from bad but its absolutely carried by the great silly vibes it has and it has some weird issues that sets it back from being a 3.5 stars to me.

For me, Deadpool is one of those games that isn't SUPER fun to play, but the other aspects of it really hold it together and make it worth at least checking it out. The game didn't take me too long to complete and I was enjoying most of my time with it. Unfortunately, I don't have an exact time, which seems to be a common trend among games I've been reviewing lately. Would love if more games told you how long you took to beat the game, but, alas, not all of them do that. I do know that I started my playthrough in March, but I took a long break from continuing the game since I was juggling so many other games at the time...so, now its November and I can finally say I beat the game.

Big sidenote: I'm not a big comic book guy, just recently got into reading them and my focus has not at all been on Marvel stuff. I jumped into this game without being very familiar with Deadpool as a character; I just knew he has a tendency to break reality and the fourth wall a lot. I found him to be quite entertaining in this game and pretty fun to actually play, but recall hearing some people complain that he acts out of character. That may be a valid complaint, it may not be. I can't give an opinion either for or against the stance considering just how little I know about the character. Can't help but wonder if the voices in his head that are a big part of him in this game are like that in the comics. My lack of experience with the character is the reason I'm not comparing what happens in this game to any comic books.

So, from what I've heard, people tend to dislike this game. Honestly, I'm not sure why. Sure, it's a pretty barebones mission-based hack-and-slash with light platforming elements (almost reminds me of the Ninja Gaiden reboot games but with much more simple and easy combat), but I never felt it was really trying to be anything more than that so it didn't bother me. I ultimately found the gameplay fun for what it is, it's not deep but it's fun to smack around goons with the three different weapons you get as well as blast them with all the different kinds of firepower you can grab. There's a shop system that uses Deadpool Points, or DP for short, as currency. You get DP either from finding it in the world, grabbing it from dead enemies, or as a reward for pulling off combos. You can buy new guns, explosives, and melee weapons from the shop, as well as various upgrades for those items. You can also upgrade Deadpool's personal attributes, like increasing his health, letting you get critical hits occasionally, making it to where you regenerate health after getting a combo, and more. Sometimes enemies drop powerful artillery that is very satisfying to blow other enemies to smithereens with. The guns themselves felt very fun to use for me, you can keep pressing or holding down the Right trigger to blitz your foes and there's an aim button for more precise shooting. There's a decently wide variety of guns, but the plasma guns and the shotguns are definitely the best (though I did still get plenty of use out of the pistols and SMGs). I feel like they're much stronger than the melee weapons, and I was even using the Hammers which seem to be the most powerful melee. The game also has a few small mechanics to use, like Momentum attacks, which are pretty much super moves to use when you're overwhelmed by enemies or you're fighting an enemy with a lot of health. Momentum is filled up by a bar as you fight enemies, but grabbing the taco boxes that drop from enemies also gives you some Momentum.

If there's one thing about the game I can understand being very polarizing, it's the humor. If you don't like meta humor, you will despise this game's jokes since there's a LOT of meta jokes here. Deadpool loves to both criticize and praise the developers, for instance, and he will constantly remind you of the fact that this is indeed a video game. There's certain parts of missions in the game that reference other games (usually retro games like Castlevania, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros, and Final Fantasy) or are meant to emulate game glitches. I found the comedy to be hit or miss; I'm not sure why, but a lot of it seems geared towards teenage perverted "memelords" that like dumb edgy humor, boobs, and retro games. Nonetheless, it was charming in it's own stupid way and I didn't hate any of the jokes (well I could do without the perverted fanservice but it didn't ruin things for me). They throw a ton of jokes at you, so the bad ones don't linger for too long. Despite its flaws, I find that the humor and the visual presentation are the main selling points of this game, they're both quite hyperactive and charming. It's primarily silly amusing things, like how Deadpool makes a joke in the beginning of the game about games giving you achievements for nothing only for you to get an achievement right after. There's a scene where you slap Wolverine to try waking him up and you can repeatedly press a button to slap him for several minutes for an achievement. It was cool how, when you meet a new plot important character, Deadpool sometimes takes you on a short montage through comic panels of that character to explain who they are. Of course, cutscenes also have some spice added to them by Deadpool's zany overexaggerated personality and the fact that he avoids exposition like the plague. Usually the game also tosses in little short quick-time-events just to add more to the game's flavor of dumb random comedy, like when Deadpool is so bored by one of Cable's explanations that a prompt shows up for you to "Press R2 to make it stop" (making Deadpool shoot himself). Sometimes you get achievements for doing the quick-time-events in a certain way, like how you get one from always choose the option to be patient while waiting in a line for a circus-like theme park ride (because that happens in this game). Something I found rather amusing about it is that, if you deliberately wait to press the button needed, you don't get punished but you do get commentary from Deadpool. Things like this are cool little features that really add a lot to a game's likeability, which I think makes up for how unremarkable the actual gameplay is. However, I will say that it will be very grating and actually make the game unlikeable if you hate how Deadpool is in this game.

The story...well, it certainly exists. It pretty much just serves as another vehicle for comedy for the most part, Deadpool is in a gritty world but his wacky antics basically bends the world around him to include weird stuff. As I mentioned earlier, Deadpool is aware of the fact that he is in a video game. In fact, the entire story starts because Deadpool gets a call from Peter Della Penna - an employee at High Noon Studios (the developer of this game) in this story - saying that they won't make a game based on him. Apparently Deadpool had a bomb planted there because he pulls out a remote bomb trigger and presses it, then immediately gets called back by Peter to have the game be made. From there, Deadpool goes on a quest to do stuff that I already forgot because it did not feel important at all. I actually like this approach to story honestly; the game doesn't pretend to have more story than it actually does, so instead it just has Deadpool chewing out the scenery and doing ridiculous things. He hates exposition, so whenever someone tries to tell him something about the story he will not be listening or doing some weird goofy thing instead. I have heard that people really don't like how anticlimactic the ending is, but honestly I was not expecting it to be anything all that crazy anyway and I found it to be very fitting. At the end of the game, Deadpool beats the tons of Mr. Sinister clones thrown his way, then the real Mr. Sinister comes out and effortlessly strikes down the X-Men. Deadpool's response is to talk to the player and gleefully reveal the surprise he's been planning all along. You, as the player, get the honor of seeing the secret through a quick-time-event: press triangle (on PS4) to make a Sentinel boot appear and crush Mr. Sinister. Roll credits.

Overall, I give the Deadpool game 3.5 stars. I think it was a fun experience with gameplay that is basic but fun and a sense of humor I found relatively appealing. I can't stress how much the presentation elevates this game above a 3 star for me.

I went into this expecting it to be a pretty bite-sized game, but I did not expect it to be as short as it is. There's only three stages. Honestly, it could have been even shorter for me if I didn't have to retry a few levels due to losing. I suppose that isn't necessarily a bad thing, just rather surprising to me. Cat Girl Without Salad is one of those April Fools games, released as a sort of "joke game" where the game announcement seems like a joke but its actually a real game. As a result, these games tend to be rather small scale and aren't meant to be taken seriously at all. With the context in mind, Cat Girl Without Salad is good at serving its purpose as a one-off gag, but you're not getting a game with much substance here. I'm kinda shocked that it has only had one other review, considering the Switch version of this game is 5 years old (8 years old for the original PC release) as of writing this review and it was made by WayForward, a decently well-known developer. I guess the novelty of being an April Fools joke didn't really give this game any more time in the spotlight.

With the way this game was marketed, you might think its some sort of genre mashup game. I know I initially thought that, anyway. The truth is, it's not; it's actually a very straightforward arcade style side scrolling shoot-'em-up. The main thing that distinguishes Cat Girl Without Salad is that the powerups are parodies of game genres, which is where the whole gimmick of it being a genre mashup comes from. You have the default Pea Shooter, then all the other powerups are parodies of the following game genres: Platformer, Puzzle, Sports, RPG, Maze (Pac-Man clone), and Rhythm. All of them were pretty fun to use except for the Rhythm powerup, which just felt counterintuitive to the game design since its difficult to focus on dodging enemy fire when you also need to follow a rhythm to be able to shoot at all. Unfortunately its pretty easy to get hit, and you lose your currently earned ability after only taking one hit with no way to get it back until the powerup pops up again after an enemy death. Considering these are pretty much the main selling point of this game, the sheer ease of losing it and having to rely on the mindless Pea Shooter was a little odd to me. Otherwise, yea, this is a standard arcade shooter, and its a little hard to screw that up.

There's no real story, so I'll just cover the characters and art style. The main character, Kebako, seems to be a goofy self-aware parody of the typical oblivious hyperactive girl you'd expect to see in an anime or something. Her design alone would probably clue you into that with how much of a purposeful mismatched mess it is, full of bright oversaturated colors and contrasting ideas. She has the memory of a goldfish, she likes food and loves to remind you of that, she is a terrible problem solver, etcetera. I have to admit, I found her character to be pretty charmingly moronic. Her assistant essentially plays the straight man to her absurdity, just trying to steer her the right way. Every other character pretty much feels like a loving parody of anime and RPG tropes, some more goofy and others more self-serious. The villains love to monologue at Kebako about their tragic past or how she ruined their lives, but she is utterly baffled by it all and barely even remembers these weirdos. I could see the jokes falling flat for a lot of people, especially considering how tiringly cliché some of it feels, but I had my brain turned off the whole time playing the game so I thought it was fine. It's just delightfully absurd.

Overall, Cat Girl Without Salad is way too barebones to justify really playing much in my opinion, but that seems to be the intention. It's a one-off gag game you play once, chuckle at a little, then probably never touch again. Still, though, its not a bad game by any means, and it serves its intended purpose well. I give this a three stars, not bad in my book but pretty unremarkable and way too short even in the context of what kind of game its meant to be (The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog for instance is another April Fools joke game that had way more content to it than this does).

So, Pokémon Scarlet/Violet...Generation 9 of Pokémon is here, in the same year as Legends Arceus too. For a long time, I was cautiously optimistic of the game. It looked promising to me, but after Sword/Shield disappointed me so much I wasn't sure if I could trust this would be good in my opinion. Mind you, Pokémon is a series I've always loved, so I didn't want to expect this game to not be good. The more info that came out about it, though, the more optimistic I became. The day after release, I got both versions physically as an early Christmas present. I decided to play through just Violet version for now, I will perhaps play through Scarlet at a later date. Now that I've beaten the game to see the credits roll (as far as I know there is no important story stuff in the post game), I'm honestly happy to say that I enjoyed my time with it. I genuinely think it is so much better than Sword/Shield and on par with Legends Arceus. I am prepared to type up another huge review. Be warned, there be spoilers in these here waters...not only for Scarlet/Violet, but also a brief spoiler for Sun/Moon and Sword/Shield.

I am going to start off this review by talking about visuals and performance, since its the main thing I've seen people buzzing about with Scarlet/Violet. I'll just begin with mentioning that I really like the new Pokemon designs in this generation. There genuinely isn't a single one I dislike, but there's also very few Pokémon I dislike in general so take that with a grain of salt. Similarly, I like the designs of all the important story characters in this game, and even all the teachers at the school (more on that in its own dedicated section) have nice designs. My only real gripe with the designs of Pokémon in this game is that, for some reason, a lot of shinies suck. They barely look any different from the original, which is a big problem since this game made it to where any shinies that appear in the overworld don't make the sparkling sound effect they do in Legends Arceus. Okay, design talk aside, let's talk graphics and performance. This subject is going to take up the bulk of this long-winded paragraph. I'm not knowledgeable on graphics myself, but even I can plainly see how rough around the edges this game looks. Certain areas like Cassowary Lake cause constant slowdown and frame drops just trying to get through the area, at some points the game lagged so much that I was worried it might crash on me like how LEGO Star Wars The Skywalker Saga sometimes experienced such intense slowdown that the game crashed (somewhat unrelated but felt it was relevant to mention here). I was surprised by just how much weirdness the visuals of this game has, like how pretty much any NPC walking in the background moves at a much slower frame rate than you or anything else in the world. Whenever I successfully caught a Pokémon, the game's camera had a tendency to clip through the ground, showing me a blue void of nothingness. In one of the gym battles, my Pokémon's model was slightly sunk into the ground. I noticed the game's shadows would appear and disappear seemingly at random. The pop-in sticks out like a sore thumb, worse than any game I played recently. The textures of the world also look awful, but I will say the textures on the Pokémon themselves look pretty good to me. These visual issues didn't ruin my experience, of course, but it is embarrassing that one of (if not the) best selling game series in the world has released a game with such little visual polish. Thankfully I haven't encountered much of the more goofy bugs that other people have found, but the fact that they exist at all is baffling to me. There's an infamous clip of a glitch in multiplayer mode where the player model transforms into this freakish glitch person with wacky proportions whenever both players hop on a bicycle. I can't claim to know why that happens or that it happened in my game. Glitches aside, there's also other oddities that are present in the game's processing. For some reason, the game seems to take a while to process the effects of moves happening; for instance, if you use a move that raises multiple stats, there is a noticeable delay of the game needing to stop to recognize that each stat was raised and relay that to the player. Using multi-hit moves have a similar result. It didn't bother me too much, but it does make things very sluggish for seemingly no reason. Its weird that certain things in the game move so slowly considering how other things, like saving the game, are very quick. I don't think this slow processing issue was present in other Switch era games so why is it a problem here? I think that statement sort of sums up this whole rant on the visual fiasco that Scarlet/Violet is. Why did the developers seem to have so many problems making this game function properly as far as visuals go? I'm not trying to throw blame on them; perhaps its just poor management or time crunches, I don't know, but its just so odd to me how all of these issues are present in a game release as comically large as Scarlet/Violet.

So, the visuals and performance are out of whack. How about the gameplay? Well...it's pretty standard Pokémon stuff. I quite enjoy it, but you're not going to get an insanely different experience here from other recent Pokémon titles as far as the core gameplay goes. It's pretty much the exact same core system its always been, but I guess its as they say: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." At this point, the only things new Pokémon games can really add to shake up the core formula are gimmicks. Terastalization is the new kid on the block for the obligatory battle gimmick shoved into every new game since X/Y. The idea behind it is that you can either add an extra type to your Pokémon or power up their current type. I have to admit that I think it is pretty cool, I love the visual design behind Terastalization since each type gets a special Tera jewel that your Terastalized Pokémon wears as a crown and it makes every Pokémon look crystallized. For as long as I've been playing this damn series, I'm still no competitive player, so I don't often think about what these battle gimmicks mean for competitive play and can't really tell you how good it is in that sense. As far as regular battles do, yea I didn't really use it a ton personally but it did serve a good purpose in letting me plow through trainers easier. I think it has potential to be used in very creative ways, it pretty much feels like a weird way of letting just about any Pokémon get a third type. Your Pokémon's Tera type is determined when you catch it (when a Pokémon has a special Tera Type you'll know because it always either comes from a raid or the overworld where it would have been glowing a bright yellow for everyone to see) but you can also change it at the Treasure Eatery in Medali. I never tried it but the game was sure to let me know about that. Speaking of eateries, yea the whole curry thing in Sword/Shield that I didn't bother with even once is replaced with picnics and sandwiches in this game. I guess the idea behind it is cool and it seems like the sandwiches offer you nice benefits (they give you special abilities like making Pokémon eggs hatch faster), but this system also replaces breeding which I don't really understand why they did considering that breeding has been the same ever since it was introduced. I don't think anyone complained that you had to put your Pokémon in a Day Care and wait for them to breed, but I guess if you really wanted that to change you may be glad to hear that you can only get eggs from picnics now. One last thing I'll mention in this paragraph is difficulty. Everyone whines about how Pokémon games aren't hard, and yea I've always thought that's kind of the whole point. Play Red/Blue and you'll see for yourself that the originals aren't hard either. Nonetheless, Scarlet/Violet did manage to at least get me to lose sometimes; the final boss is actually quite tough and took me a few tries to beat, which even the champion fights were unable to do. I also lost to the Water gym leader once, but that's only because I made a goof and forgot what type Crabominable is (I did not lose to a single gym leader after him).

The choice to set the game in a school and have the player take classes is just strange to me. Yes, I am dedicating a whole paragraph to this. To me, it kind of just felt like another objective to throw at you. For the uninitiated, basically the game starts with introducing you to Uve Academy (it has a different name in Scarlet but its exactly the same as Violet's academy otherwise) and having you enroll in it. From there, the game has like one or two mandatory cutscenes of your character doing schoolwork, then a time-skip happens and you get the freedom to do what you want because the school is having a treasure hunt event. The treasure hunt isn't for treasure in the physical sense, but rather a metaphorical sense; you go out into the world to experience new things and gain knowledge, which I guess is sort of like unearthing treasure. Its like the excuse the game gives to open up after about a few minutes to an hour of bombarding you with cutscenes and scripted encounters for plot progression. The thing is, once the treasure hunt begins, you're encouraged to go take classes by talking to the lady at the counter. More classes even open up as you start taking on gym leaders. I think this is meant to be something to help new players, but admittedly some questions actually stumped me as someone who's been a fan of this series for as long as I've been on this earth. I suppose its a neat side activity, but it felt way longer than it needed to be. There's seven different classes and six...uh I'll just call them "parts" for now since I'm not sure what else to call it. Whenever you take a class, a cutscene begins and you listen to the teachers give a spiel. The game will give you an opportunity to shout out answers to a question they bring up, which you can do. There's no punishment for choosing the wrong answer (even in Pokémon I'm god awful at math so naturally I got some answers wrong there), though you'll want to remember the answers or just look them up online since you get a Midterm exam and a Finals exam for each course. Really makes this feel like a school experience, eh? There's one extra side thing related to the academy involving what are basically extremely dumbed down Persona social links with all the teachers. I know everyone makes this corny joke, but, as the guy that literally calls himself Bob on the Cob, I'm no stranger to corniness...and that's also pretty much what it feels like. You can go to different rooms of the academy, which sometimes have neat stuff to interact with like the lore books in the big entrance hall and the lunch ladies in the cafeteria (you can buy sandwiches from them), but I found myself mainly going there to do these diet Coca-Cola social links. As you go through the classes of a certain teacher, you can talk to the teachers to bond with them. I mostly just did it as a fun flavor thing and found myself surprised with how much I liked the characters of all the teachers. They're not super deep or anything, but they all have at least something going on in their backstories which you learn through bonding with them and they all had pretty fun personalities. Nonetheless, the rewards for going through the tedium of doing all these classes and moving around through many different areas of the academy to keep talking to them...man it really did not feel all that worth it. I will say that the tons of EXP Candies you get showered with for passing all the exams was nice, but for bothering with the social link stuff you don't get much. The most useful reward is from Ms. Raifort, the history teacher, who marks those little stakes on the map you have to interact with to get the legendary Pokémon for you. Mr. Salvatore, the language teacher, does give you an Galarian Meowth, which I think is the only way to get it in this game. All in all, they try to make doing all the classes and getting good diet cola social links with all the teachers feel worthwhile, but I ultimately feel like this whole system could have been axed and no one would have complained. Tying legendaries to all this filler was lame, although I do hear it is still possible to find all the stakes needed to activate the caves the legendaries are hiding in without getting it all marked on your map by the history teacher.

Okay, enough ranting about the classes. What about the story? I think it was pretty alright. I'm not a big story buff myself and I don't expect my Pokémon games to have groundbreaking narratives, but I appreciate that this game at least tried to do something cool. The big unique thing with this game's story is the three divulging paths you can choose to go on: Starfall Street, Path of Legends, and Victory Road. In Victory Road, its just the basic Pokémon story of taking down every Gym Leader and then fighting the Elite Four. Path of Legends is a bit different, involving you taking down some big Pokémon (not Dynamax lol) known as Titan Pokémon to get mystical herbs for Arven so he can use them to save his Pokemon from a fatal illness (honestly a pretty touching little story). Finally, there's Starfall Street, which focuses exclusively on taking down the evil team of this game, Team Star...except they're not necessarily an evil team, but that's something I'll detail when I start talking specifically about characters. I really like the idea behind this system, but I think it falls short in a few ways. In my opinion, the main problem here is that you're highly encouraged to do all three paths anyway. You'd think you should have a choice in the matter, but honestly you kind of don't. If you try to skip Victory Road completely, it won't be long until you get railroaded into your Pokémon not listening to you because that still relies on gym badges, so its pretty much mandatory unless you really like your Pokémon refusing to do anything in battle. When I finished up the objectives in Path of Legends and Victory Road so that I could focus more on doing Starlight Street, I still ended up being right at the same level as the last Team Star boss. There is no level scaling, so there seems to be a set intended order to which Team Star bosses, Titan Pokémon, and Gym Leaders you're meant to fight at which time. This intended path includes the objectives of all three story paths, which I just think is odd considering how much the game seemed to emphasize the importance of choosing which path you want to do. You can finish the final objective for all three stories so you don't have to choose just one, but you also have to finish all three story paths to truly see what the story has to offer since they don't give you endings in a traditional sense. Once you beat Arven in Path of Legends, Penny in Starlight Street, and Nemona in Victory Road, then Arven calls you to let you know he's ready for exploring Area Zero with you. This starts a new fourth story path that didn't exist before called "The Way Home" and the credits only roll once you finish that path. All of this is to say that the story really seems built as if it was all one big story instead of three different story paths. Ultimately this wasn't a big problem for me since I wouldn't want to miss out on what the other paths offer, but the game definitely seems balanced for people like me when I really think there should've been the option to feasibly focus on only one story path. What if someone wanted to only do Starlight Street and finish the game that way, you know? It really undermines the game's sense of freedom.

The characters of this game are pretty neat. I've already mentioned how I like the visual designs of all of them; I'm not sure why but Game Freak has really been making some excellent charming character designs lately. I think the motivations for the main important characters of the narrative are interesting in their own ways. Nemona is your rival who seems to think of literally nothing but battling, she is obsessed with it and mentions it every time she sees you. She is also the champion, but not in the Blue/Green way where he becomes champion because of your rivalry. Nemona was the champion the whole time and was merely adjusting her teams to fit each fight with you because she loves battling with you that much, and I think that has a certain charm to it. People find her annoying, and I can definitely understand why, but personally I like to headcanon her as an autistic person like I am, so I found myself relating to her looking at her with that lens. I'm probably a little biased in liking her since she reminded me a lot of Barry, the rival in Pokémon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum. Nonetheless, I find her to be a neat character, plus I like the idea of a champion that got so bored looking for worthy challengers that she decided to cling to you as soon as she saw your potential. Arven is a character I was very unsure of if I was going to like when I first saw him, but I ended up enjoying his character. Arven seems to be the emotional core of this game honestly when it comes to characters. Professor Turo - Arven's father and the professor of Pokémon Violet - was so focused on his work that he never came home, so Arven hates his father because of that. From what I hear, this plot point is exactly the same in Scarlet except Sada is Arven's mother instead of Turo being Arven's father (I would have liked if Sada's existence was at least mentioned in Violet since it just sounds weird to me to see her suddenly be in that role). Arven even says that he doesn't have a single memory of Turo playing with him. Arven's main Pokémon, Mabosstiff, was his only companion, but Mabosstiff is also the Pokémon that happened to get struck with an illness that couldn't be cured by anything except the Herba Mystica. That happened because Arven went down to Area Zero. Of course, this started Arven's whole journey with you to take down the Titan Pokémon. The last character that takes center stage in one of the story paths is Penny. She is a shy nerdy hacker classmate. I'm just going to say it, the twist of Penny being the secret leader of Team Star is so obvious. Professor Clavell threw a fast one at me claiming he was the boss - I almost believed it honestly - but Penny is the leader like basically everyone thought. Speaking of Clavell, he shows up to help you take down Team Star as "Clive", who is very obviously Clavell in a wig. I found him to be a pretty entertaining character, although I think the joke of him being an out-of-touch overly professional old guy is used a little too much. The last thing I found rather notable about the characters in this game is their interactions with each other. In the last story path - The Way Home - you get to see Penny, Nemona, and Arven talk and get to know each other better as you explore through Area Zero with them. You get neat little background details to the characters through this that I really enjoyed seeing. It's the kind of thing that they didn't have to put in, but is a great addition nonetheless. The characters have pretty charming interactions in general, like how Penny and Arven like to poke fun at each other in an almost rival type way. I found it funny how Penny would often comment on how annoying and ditzy Nemona can be, but Penny also seems to admire her bravery. We also learn how Nemona seems to not understand emotional cues: there's a scene where your Miraidon meets another Miraidon and is clearly afraid, but after the encounter, Nemona does not understand why your Miraidon is acting the way it does until Penny chastises her for it. Another point for the autism headcanon? Perhaps. We also learn a little bit about the families of Nemona and Penny through these conversations. Nemona's father is on the board of a Rotom Phone company, but that's all we get to learn about him. Penny finds her dad to be overbearing and she hates how he calls her by cutesy nicknames. Arven kind of comes out of his shell when interacting with the player, Nemona, and Penny in a few ways. He has an amusing character quirk of being attention seeking, since he often looks to either one-up their stories or grab their interest, only to be shut down immediately. Honestly Penny is kind of an ass to him at times, but she softens up once she realizes everything he's gone through. Arven also reveals why he's always seemed to harbor a grudge against Miraidon: its because he felt jealous of Miraidon. In his own words, he felt Miraidon was stealing Turo's attention away, which really just made me sympathize with Arven even more. Overall, I just wanted to give a shoutout to this whole portion of the story since it adds a lot more likeability to the characters and makes them seem more realistic. The conversations really feel like something teenagers would just casually talk about amongst each other.

I'm going to dedicate a paragraph for Team Star themselves that was meant to be included in the previous paragraph but just got TOO in-depth to be mashed in there. The Team Star bosses are all technically pretty important to the story considering that the majority of Starlight Street is focused on them. I'm really not sure how to feel about Team Star as a whole, although I will say it's pretty interesting how they're not really an evil team. I like subversions of the usual Pokémon tropes - I love Team Skull and they're basically a walking parody of evil Pokémon teams - and Team Star really subvert expectations even further by being seen as bad guys even though they pretty much did nothing wrong. The gist of Team Star is that they were all bullied and eventually tried to stand up for themselves because the school failed to stop the bullies. The story seems to be making a critique of the school system itself and how it ostracizes people that were bullied instead of taking action to stop bullying, since the old figureheads of the school were the ones that did nothing to help Team Star with bullying. Professor Clavell initially almost fell for the narrative of them being troublemakers, too, but, when he joined you in your invasion of Team Star bases (of course under the Clive persona), he took the opportunity to learn more about them and their situation. Penny and the Team Star bosses were in danger of being expelled because of the bad reputation the team was getting, so Penny decided that they must be stopped to prevent that from happening. The reason she had the player go invade their bases and defeat the bosses one by one was because she had tried several times to get the team to disband and they wouldn't listen (the team has a code where they must step down if they are defeated and the bosses are all very loyal to this code). The bosses and Penny have this big emotional reconciliation at the end of Starfall Street's story, where Penny reveals who she is to you and tries to disband the team once you defeat her, but Clavell gets the bosses together with Penny to reveal to them that the team will stay together as the staff of a new facility based off the team. He also mentions that he will make up for the school's failure to stop bullies. My opinion has kind of flipped on Team Star, I went in expecting to not like this "Actually they were right all along" narrative with them but I think it was handled well. Nonetheless, I do think its weird how there's no real villains in this game. Sun/Moon and Sword/Shield had a bunch of clowns as the "evil team" you see for most of the game, but there was still a real evil team at the end (Macro Cosmos in Sword/Shield and the Aether Foundation in Sun/Moon). Also, if I remember correctly, we don't even learn what the team did to stop bullies after the team was formed. They just have bases of operation around the map where they do...stuff, I guess?

This paragraph is probably going to be comparatively brief to the others, but I feel its important to discuss the twist behind Professor Turo revealed at the very end of The Way Home (and, in turn, the end of the game). The Professor Turo you've been talking to all game actually an AI clone of the real one, created to help him make the time machine that brought the Paradox Pokémon to this world. I can give this twist credit for being unexpected and making for an interesting ending, but it just feels indescribably silly to me and I'm not sure why it makes me feel that way. It's not even like weird sci-fi stuff like this doesn't have a place in the series - Mewtwo, the Ultra Beasts, and Deoxys exist - but its just kind of off-putting to me nonetheless. Basically the story behind this is Professor Turo created a time machine with the help of his AI clone, ended up dying for his research, then the AI has been helping you for the sake of having you come to Area Zero to destroy the time machine they built (and you were chosen specifically because the AI is programmed to attack when the time machine is tampered with and it knew you were strong enough to stop it). From what I hear, there is also an AI clone of Sada in Pokemon Scarlet, and I can only imagine how odd that is. One thing I will praise about this is how this is sort of a reversal of how the trope of AI clones usually goes: Turo is pretty much the only person in this game you can call a bad guy and his AI clone knows that. The AI wants to be a better person than the man it was based on, to the point where it even tells Arven that it loves him and knows his real father still would have loved Arven. I think the end of the AI is a bit lame, I was thinking it would go for a heroic sacrifice or something but instead it goes through the time machine right before you destroy it, saying it hopes to go on an adventure too. Despite my gripes with this ending, I really think it elevated the whole story by a considerable margin. I genuinely believe it is one of the most heartfelt endings in Pokémon and it is the main reason I said Arven is the emotional core of this story. It really makes you want to give Arven a hug or something after all he's had to go through, but thankfully it ends on a happy note since everyone escaped and got to return back to normal life. Shaking off the trauma of your real dad having been dead for years, which you didn't even know until it was thrown onto to you by an AI version of your dad that also ended up having to leave you, is no easy feat, that's for sure.

I think this is probably the longest review I've written on this website. If you've read all of it, that really does mean so much to me and I appreciate you taking interest in my rambling. All things considered, the game gets a solid 4 stars from me. It has some very noticeable issues - mainly in presentation and graphics - but I think it is easily one of the best Pokémon games out there when you can look past all of that and just appreciate its gameplay and the kind of story its telling (nothing super deep but still pretty interesting and heartwarming).

To tell the truth, LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga (I will refer to it as just TCS for brevity's sake) is a game I wasn't sure about getting. The original two LEGO Star Wars games are ones I hold near and dear to my heart. In fact, they introduced me to Star Wars as a whole, and I have very nostalgic memories of the games. I typically just pop my discs in the PS2 whenever I'm looking for a LEGO Star Wars fix, so I've never owned TCS until recently. I saw it was on sale on Steam for like 4 dollars, and...well, if its that cheap, I lose nothing by buying it. I found myself pleasantly surprised by it, and I've clocked 27 hours in it according to Steam (but 17 hours in-game).

To clarify, my main concern was that this was going to feel pointless to grab since I assumed it was exactly the same as the original games. I already love the games, so I wasn't worried about not enjoying it. For the most part, TCS pretty much is the same, but there's a good amount of nice little changes that improve the game overall and make it feel like a definitive edition package deal of the originals. For me, the little things are what make LEGO games so fun. The core of it is stuff you pretty much know what you're getting, since they're well known for being incredibly easy games and most are licensed games based directly on the source material. That being said, the changes in this game were almost entirely for the better in my opinion. Would you believe me if I told you Count Dooku and Emperor Palpatine didn't have Force Lightning in the original duology? Well, they do now, and frankly they should've had it to begin with. Other small neat changes include Chewbacca being able to tear off the arms of prequel Clone troopers (this wasn't a thing in the first game which had the prequel missions), your ally trying to attack you in the hub if you have a hero as your partner when you're a villain, some additional content like a 2 player arcade mode or characters that weren't present in either the first and second game, and probably more stuff I missed since many of these changes are admittedly quite small. The most changes was for content from the first game based on the prequels. Considering that it was the first of the hundreds of LEGO games out there, its not surprising that it got this treatment. The hub world is now based on the Cantina from the second game, whereas in the first game it was Dexter's Diner. A few levels from the first game got altered significantly: Gunship Cavalry - a mission in Episode 2 - was once an autoscrolling shooter (and a very frustrating one at that since it was so easy to go out of bounds), but it got changed to be uniform with the rest of the ship missions in TCS that were all based on the second LSW game's ship missions. In fact, Episode 2 is the only one that had an entirely new mission added in TCS, which shows the ship chase from the movie featuring Anakin and Obi-Wan hunting down the bounty hunter Zem Wesell. Worth noting that the Pod Racing level also had some major differences, mainly in that its been shortened considerably and made less punishing overall. Also, every level from the first game had locations for Red Bricks added in, since Red Bricks weren't in the first game. Basically nothing from the second game's missions got changed at all. Needless to say, aside from the core of the game being almost entirely the same, TCS did make good changes to the content that I appreciate.

Gameplay wise, TCS is like any other LEGO game. If you've played one, you've pretty much played them all, but honestly that's no knock against them in my opinion since the core is fun. You go through a linear set of missions where the goal is to solve easy puzzles and fight any enemies in your way so that you can progress to the end. Each mission often follows events of the source material the game is based on. Missions are divided by which movie the events depicted take place in, from Episode 1 to Episode 6. Each episode has about 5 or 6 missions in them, plus a bonus mission not related to the story that's unlocked whenever you complete the episode. You're free to do the episodes in any order you like as soon as you complete Episode 1, but I finished them in numerical order anyway. While you're completing these levels, you come across Studs, the currency of the game. You get Studs from doing pretty much any sort of interaction with objects, from destroying them to using the Force for various effects on them. You can then use these Studs in the hub world to unlock characters after beating the story mission necessary to gain the option to buy them (there's also stuff like Extras or vehicles you can grab with Studs). Each character is in a sort of character archetype that has unique powers utilized in the missions, oftentimes needed to either access an optional room or activate important parts of a puzzle. Jedi and Sith have the Force, gun characters have a grapple hook they can use on red target spaces, bounty hunters have bombs to blow up silver objects, Astromech droids and Protocol droids have special terminals to open doors or do other important functions for progression...that sort of thing. This way, unless the character you're playing has no weapons at all (and no other uses like how young Anakin can't do anything in combat but can slip through vents), every character has some kind of purpose to fulfill in a mission. If its just characters you're looking for, then you'll easily be able to afford almost everyone just from playing if you're patient enough to get as many Studs as you possibly can from missions. Admittedly there were a few missions that were such a pain in the neck to keep my Studs on that I just finished them with very few on me. Speaking of which, ship missions are lame and I dislike them. They all play practically the same and they just feel very tedious to get through because of how much focus is put on the torpedos you need to find. The controls are also very odd, far from smooth.

Overall, I think The Complete Saga manages to be a truly definitive package. There are some details I would have liked to see added, like perhaps giving an option to go to Dexter's Diner for those with nostalgia for the first game (like me), and some sore spots of the originals are still there. I was disappointed to see that the ship missions are just as boring and annoying as I remember them being as a kid. Nonetheless, I have little to complain about here as a longtime fan of these games. I enjoyed my time with this.

So, this was quite the interesting experience. I did not expect all the twists and turns this game would put me through (one of the rare cases I go through a popular game completely unspoiled) and they were intriguing indeed.

SUPERHOT's gameplay is definitely the main appeal of the game and for good reason. The idea of having time move only when you move (it isn't entirely true since time does still move its just incredibly slow when you're standing still) really sort of flips the way an FPS is usually played on its head. I have never played an FPS game where moving slowly is optimal and trying to move fast is punished, but that's exactly what SUPERHOT does. You are encouraged to move slowly so that you can properly deal with enemies, otherwise you will likely either get shot by very fast bullets or you will get ganged up on to the point where you might as well just restart. Admittedly it could get very frustrating - I died countless times to the last section of the final level - but the concept is intriguing and it felt satisfying once I got it right. The levels are basically short gauntlets where you need to defeat every enemy to progress to the next level. Enemies can be hiding anywhere in the map, so it can get pretty tricky in the bigger areas. You either use your fists, throwable items like bottles or garbage bags, full fledged weapons like baseball bats or swords, and guns (which you will always want to use over anything else). There's three kinds of guns: pistols, shotguns, and rifles. The pistol is the most straightforward one and is probably the best in my opinion. I found that the rifle's rapid fire is awkward in SUPERHOT's whole gimmick of time being incredibly slow when you're not moving, but there were some levels I got good use out of it in. The shotgun is your standard FPS shotgun in that its usually only all that good in close combat; the spread is large but concentrated, so its harder to hit enemies from far away. Overall I think this was great.

The story...if it weren't for the gameplay being so great, I'd think this was intended to be the real meat and potatoes of the game. That's not to imply its some masterpiece, but it was genuinely compelling in my opinion. Essentially, you have received access to a VR game called...well, SUPERHOT. The game's main menu mimics a PC menu (but a very simple and retro feeling one) to show how the player logs into superhot.exe and that sort of thing, it has a meta aspect in that way. You play the game as normal, but, as you keep playing, a glitch happens claiming you have unauthorized access and the game (in the story not the actual game) kicks you out. You get messages from an unknown friend of the player who seems to have sent the game to you in the first place and he informs you that there's a new version of the game that fixes the glitches. Again, the game plays as normal for a while, but that same error message eventually pops up again. The friend tells you there's a new set of levels but they're password-protected. Thankfully you don't have to find or memorize a password anywhere since the automatic typing sections of SUPERHOT do it for you. Another session of levels later and you get met with an ominous screen detecting a breach location, where the game then claims it knows where you live, showing a depiction of the player with a VR headset on. The game glitches and kicks you out again. Basically, to not overexplain the story, things get more and more strange from here as you continue to play levels. The gist of this, as I understood it, is that the game is made by some sort of malicious AI program that wants to suck people into it. Near the end of the game its implied that the program gave the player a concussion (there's a level where you have to attack the game's depiction of the player with a VR headset on and there's a text section where the program talks to you and says you're suffering from brain trauma). It constantly warns to leave while you still can but the player continues playing, and eventually the player's brain gets downloaded into the program where you essentially become a slave to it. This is also when the infamous meme spammed everywhere about this game happens: the program tells you to get other people into the game by saying "Superhot is the most innovative shooter I've played in years!" I'm usually not a huge fan of the whole sentient game concept - I really don't care for how Doki Doki Literature Club did it for example - but it wasn't done in a pretentious way here and it was pretty unexpected. I like the game's story.

I'll take this last paragraph before the conclusion to briefly shout out how much I like the art style of SUPERHOT. I don't know what they call this style but I really love how vibrant and polygonal it is, its simple but pleasing to the eye and very cool looking in my opinion. The enemies and the player especially just look so nice here. The PC sections also have an interesting style that almost reminds me of the Five Nights at Freddy's games for some reason.

SUPERHOT isn't going to completely blow your mind in my opinion and I don't really think its super replayable (then again not many games are in my opinion), but I think it was a great experience overall. I would recommend it, gets a solid 4 stars out of me.

So...Sonic Frontiers was quite the interesting experience. I'm someone that has always had a passing interest in Sonic, but haven't really took the time to sit down and play through the games to completion. Nonetheless, I do know a lot about this series through the fact that I used to be obsessed with it as a kid (can't count how many wiki articles I've read through and fan discussion I've seen of stuff like the IDW comics which I've been meaning to read through). I've always loved the Adventure games and I have at least tried many Sonic games. The Genesis era games, Heroes, Sonic 06, Shadow the Hedgehog, Generations, even Sonic Chronicles...these are all games I've played over the years from my childhood love of the blue blur, but none have interested me enough to go through the effort of beating them. That wasn't the case with Frontiers, which interested me enough to take the time to fully complete. From what I can tell, this game is supposed to be a "return to form" from the strangely comedy focused and watered down direction that Colors and Boom took the series in. Personally, I think this one tries a little too hard and overcorrects at times, but that's a complaint I'll detail later in this review.

When I played through Sonic Frontiers, I sought to do everything I could. There's no shortage of activities to do in this game, so I figured: "Why not do it all?" Thankfully the Platinum trophy was pretty easy to get, it will be yours so long as you do most of the stuff the game throws your way (aside from one specific trophy that's annoying to get unless you exploit an enemy's design). I wanted to fully complete everything I possibly could in the game, so I went through the trouble of doing a bunch of stuff that doesn't actually count towards the Platinum. Needless to say, I saw everything the game has to offer...except for the secret final boss only accessible through playing Hard difficulty, but honestly its just one extra boss fight and doesn't change the ending at all so I'm still counting my playthrough as 100%. I found that Sonic Frontiers is a game with some great stuff I love and some weird stuff that made me scratch my head at best or actively annoyed me at worst. I will detail all my thoughts in the later paragraphs of this review; you know, organization and all that jazz. I'm fairly confident in saying that I did overall enjoy my time with the game, though.

The story...eh, it has it's ups and downs. I didn't find it all that remarkable in total, but I appreciated the more serious tone it has in comparison to other more recent Sonic games and it does have interesting additions to the lore for the whole series assuming this game is canon. Essentially, the story's premise is that Sonic's friends get trapped in the same dimension Cyber Space is in and Sonic is sent to a strange new world. Sonic has to explore through the four islands of this world to find his friends and help them. Whenever he finds them, they're trapped in cages that he must get rid of, but this causes corruption to his body every time he does it. This becomes important later as Sonic gets more and more corrupted, but strangely this doesn't impact gameplay at all which I feel was a bit of a missed opportunity. He also must find the Chaos Emeralds in each island so he can turn into Super Sonic to defeat the four Titans; one Titan per island. Sonic Frontiers introduces the Ancients, a new species that is very important to the plot. The Ancients are the big new super important historical civilization that built a ton of the stuff Sonic interacts with on the islands. Specifically, they are aliens with highly advanced tech that moved to the world that this game takes place in after their home world was destroyed. The Ancients share some key similarities to the Echidnas: both are closely tied to the Chaos Emeralds and nearly got completely wiped out. Even Knuckles notices the similarities. Also, as a somewhat interesting side detail, the Ancients bare a noticeable resemblance to Chaos from Sonic Adventure, which I doubt was merely coincidental considering that Chaos also has a close connection to the Chaos Emeralds (and the Echidnas). All of these connections admittedly makes me hope and pray they haven't forgotten about the Chao since I love them and I desperately want a new Chao Garden feature in a game, but I digress. As the story progresses, Sonic learns more about who the Ancients are and what the purpose behind their elaborate machinery is. You'll find things like cranes, cannons, towers, large obelisk-like structures, and more, all identified by a distinct style of architecture almost similar to something you'd see in Breath of the Wild. The Challenges, Guardians, Titans, and Cyber Space are also all invented by them...yea, they built both the enemies and things that help you. The lore reason for this is because the Titans were built to take down a big bad that you only see at the very end of the game. So, naturally, the Ancients are a huge deal to Sonic lore; SEGA went as far as to make a canonical origin story to the Chaos Emeralds (as far as I know that hasn't been done before) tied directly to the Ancients. Apparently, their old home world is now where the Chaos Emeralds were originally native to before finding their way in Sonic's world. I'm not sure if I think that was a good addition or not, but it sure is something that happened. You know what was also something that happened? The ending. Everyone talks about how disappointing it was and unfortunately I have to echo that sentiment. Overall, this game definitely focuses on story quite a lot, but things still feel a bit half-baked and that ending just reeks of disappointment.

Alright, let's talk characters and writing. The main new character introduced in this game is Sage, some kind of cyber girl that was created to serve Eggman. She is a case of being intentionally meant to leave a bad first impression since she starts out pretty unlikeable and strange, being antagonistic to Sonic and utterly refusing to explain anything about where he is. She slowly opens up to him more and her reasons are revealed later (her data says Sonic will die and she's already programmed by Eggman so she's naturally antagonistic to him at first). I think she blossomed into a neat character and I can see why the fandom seems to like her so much. Not a fan of the fake out death they did with her, felt it was just done for a cheap attempt at emotional manipulation especially since we learn in this game that Eggman is going to bring her back anyway. Nonetheless, I would like to see her show up again sometime, maybe even become a staple character as one of Eggman's assistants alongside Cubot and Orbot. As far as the characters in general are, I think they were all handled pretty decently. With the way the story is put together, each major character essentially has their own island to themselves with a bunch of conversations to unlock. I liked most of the characterization and moments of interaction, like how Sonic helps Tails through his insecurities and that moment when Sage starts to cry after she realizes just how strong Tails and Sonic's bond is. However, I do have some gripes with the writing itself. There's two major things this game's writing does that I don't like: parts that feel like very on the nose responses to criticism - like the infamous scene where Tails calls himself inconsistent (which seems to be a direct nod from the writers on how much fans hate that one scene of Tails cowering in Forces) - and parts that reference facets of Sonic lore or obscure Sonic facts seemingly just to flex the fact that the writers do indeed know that. I know the latter point is criticized a lot, which I think has become way overblown since its not like it ruins the game's storytelling, but nonetheless I did find it odd when the characters randomly bring up something from the past that hasn't been relevant in several years. At one point, Tails says that the big bad must be way stronger than Dark Gaia. You know, the main boss from Sonic Unleashed, a game that came out 14 years ago and has never been directly ported to modern consoles (aside from Xbox backwards compatibility)? I don't think Dark Gaia has even shown up in anything since Unleashed. In one part of the story, Sonic tells Amy he'll be back "before she can even do a Tarot card reading"...for those who were understandably confused by that line, Amy is sometimes associated with tarot cards and I'm pretty sure it's not something she has done in the actual games in decades (and it's not like she does anything with it in Frontiers either so it's just here for a giga brain reference). Don't get me wrong, I like me some deep cut references every now and then, but these feel like such random inclusions whenever they show up and they're shoved in a little too much for my liking. Also, the game has two instances of random flashbacks to previous games through a screenshot ripped from the games and slapped on the screen for a few seconds. One of these moments didn't even really make sense in the context of what was happening and I just thought this was weird and unnecessary. At the very least, they clearly had fun here with the tons of references and I can see the merit in it. I just think it's too prevalent in this game.

Okay, with all that story stuff out of the way, time to finally actually talk about the gameplay. I felt it was pretty fun and satisfying overall, but it has some weird jankiness at times that makes precision difficult. In the open world, the game has segments of 2D platforming indicated by a spring, boost pad, or something of the like just sitting out there for you to interact with. I've seen a lot of people complain about it and I can definitely see why, its the jankiest part of the game in my opinion. Most of the time, it works fine, but the 2D perspective will shift back to a 3D one whenever you fall or when you accidentally leave the scripted 2D area. If you're just running through the world and accidentally touch a spring or something, the game is going to instantly snap into 2D mode and make you go through the area. These segments also have dedicated walls for you to climb, and I swear these are absolutely the jankiest part of the game bar none. You'd think the slow climb would give you more precision, but Sonic would move straight down or up when I was clearly holding a different direction. The wall-run sometimes just refuses to work and has you zoom away from the wall. This was very annoying and made the 2D parts of the game's open world irritating. On the plus side, things feel pretty solid overall in the open world. Once you get the massive speed boost from filling up your ring counter to 400 (or increasing your speed stat to Level 99), it feels exhilarating just darting through the world. Open world games are so much more fun when you have a crazy method of travel, like how Spider-Man has his web-swinging, and Sonic's high speed works great with that, although you'll need to max out your Speed stat if you want to stay super quick indefinitely. Speaking of which, not really a fan of this game's stat system. I think it was done to try and inspire a curve of progression, but it doesn't really feel all that natural. There are so many levels for your Attack, Defense, Speed, and Ring stats that it just feels excessive.

So, the combat. Sonic Frontiers definitely puts more of a focus on it here than I think any other mainline Sonic game has done before. I feel that it had a lot of potential, but ended up pretty middling. You get some new moves from the skill tree (since I guess every game needs to have that nowadays) and they are decently fun to use, but realistically you'll only be using a few of them. The Sonic Boom is probably the most fun one to use in my opinion since its a speedy barrage of projectiles that keep shooting out the longer you hold down the button. Combat is unfortunately another area of Sonic Frontiers that is affected by jank. A big example is how the game is supposed to automatically target enemies, but sometimes it just doesn't work as intended. Moves like the Sonic Boom and Cross Slash (no not the FFVII kind) suffer majorly from this issue since a dynamic camera angle happens every time you use those moves, which can really screw up the auto-targeting. Also, sometimes the game just doesn't recognize that you did a combo move. Some combo moves require you to press two buttons together, but those buttons are also tied to other features, so the game may prioritize the regular move over the combo move. The Boost button (R2 on PS4) has a few combo moves, and these were especially janky since the game tends to prioritize Boosting over the combo moves. It is very irritating, but, when the combat isn't refusing to work, its a lot of fun. One thing I will praise about the combat is the awesome Titan fights, those were always a blast even if they weren't all that challenging. The only problem with them is that there's so much happening in them and Sonic moves so fast that its very easy to just break the camera. The Titan fights also tend to suffer from the problems with auto-targeting perhaps the most out of any other fights.

One thing I will say about this game's structure is that I think it feels a little bloated. There are a ton of collectibles, each with their own intended purposes, and it does feel like a bit much. The Seeds of Power and Seeds of Defense raise those stats, the Kocos are collected to be used for increasing your Speed and Ring stats, the Vault Keys open the Chaos Emerald Vaults, the Gears are used to open up Cyber Space levels, purple coins let you go fishing with Big the Cat, fishing tokens are used to buy stuff from Big, gold cards are also used to buy stuff from Big, the Memory Tokens are different for each island and are used to gatekeep story progress (as well as let you talk to the characters for Side Stories)...it's just a whole lot of stuff and I can't help but feel like half of it could've been trimmed out. Also, the game likes to just insert random mini games you have to play through. It's not a bad idea to break things up a little so it doesn't get monotonous, but I really don't think this game needed several Koco herding mini games, three Space Invaders style mini games (four if you count the secret final boss that uses this style of play for some reason), and a single pinball area just shoved in there. As much as I love the fishing, it also felt pretty unnecessary and honestly kind of breaks the progression balance since you can just buy nearly everything you need from Big if you're good at fishing...and the Purple Coins aren't hard to come by at all if you got lucky like I did with the Starfall. Whenever that event happens, it brings back the enemies you took down, but it also activates a limited time slot roulette that can give you a shit ton of purple coins if you know how to play it. I got the Starfall at least once on every island and it made it to where I was at 999 purple coins for a long time, so naturally I had plenty of money to fish with Big and buy just about anything I needed. Once I was on the last island, I was rolling in fishing tokens, so I could just buy all the Koco and Seeds I needed to max out those stats with a ton of tokens still left over. It's kind of busted and makes me feel like all of these collectibles and extra systems weren't needed at the end of the day.

I'll dedicate this paragraph to some nitpicks I have with Sonic Frontiers. I previously discussed my major grievances with the game, so I will just talk about minor problems here. Biggest one of these nitpicks for me is that it's VERY tedious to level up your Speed and Ring stats; for whatever reason, you have to manually level it up one by one until you run out of Kocos or you reach Level 99. They literally already have leveling in bulk with Hermit Koco, since he just takes every seed you have on your person to instantly increase your Power and Defense to the appropriate levels, why is there no option to buy Speed and Ring upgrades in bulk? If they're worried about players regretting the choice of one over the other, there already is a way to swap Speed stat gains with Ring stat and vice versa (which you also can't do in bulk for some reason). The game just expects you to patiently spam to get through Elder Koco's dialogue each time as you sluggishly level up and it makes no sense to me. Another notable nitpick of mine is that there's no way to change the in-game time of day...which is a problem when every island has some Challenges that can only be attempted when it's night time. You either have to go do something else while you wait on it to be night time or do some other activity in the game and remember to come back once the moon comes up. I'm no developer, but I don't see any reason why there is no option to immediately skip time unless it's meant to be some kind of immersion thing (which would be silly imo considering this world has random springs, speed bumps, rails, walls, and loop-de-loops that just unnaturally lead to each other when Sonic does platforming there). Probably my least significant nitpick is that I don't like how you can continue to get collectibles even if you've long since used them for what they're meant to be used for. It's just a personal gripe that bothers me, I don't like to keep getting useless things and have it tally up in the map. For example, I finished the skill tree pretty early in the game and it drove me mad that my skill points just kept building up to nearly 200 by the end of the game when I had no use for it anymore.

The last topic I'll talk about here is the visual design. I think everything looks pretty good graphically aside from the distractingly common pop-in and the fact that the fishing area's water is buggy as all hell for some reason. However, my big problem is that the islands themselves aren't that interesting. Kronos Island is pretty much just a big grassland, same with Rhea Island and Ouranos Island (those areas also noticeably reuse a lot of stuff from Kronos Island). Ares Island is the most generic desert area you'll ever see. Chaos Island is a big volcanic wasteland. The Cyber Space levels are somehow even more generic since all of them just repackage the same aesthetics of previous stages in the Sonic series. I got tired of seeing the same Chemical Plant Zone, Green Hill Zone, and City Escape aesthetic that a ton of the Cyber Space levels share. I know this is done for a lore reason - they're built on Sonic's memories - but I really feel these could have been so much more creative than they actually were.

Phew, that review was ludicrously long, wouldn't you say? I have a bad tendency of rambling. I'll just end this with a short conclusion. Sonic Frontiers gets a decent 3.5 stars from me; it had potential to be truly amazing, but all the little problems really add up. Nonetheless, I still enjoyed my time with it, and I look forward to seeing what SEGA does with the extended campaign coming out as free DLC later.

Okay I heard this DLC campaign was short, but I did not expect it to only be one mission. I found playing Jetstream Sam to be a lot of fun and I would've liked if he just got one or two more missions. His play style is similar to Raiden, especially in the part of the base game where Raiden gets Sam's sword, but Sam stands out in this DLC campaign by being a very aggressive fighter. He can't do stealth kills, which I thought was pretty cool since I didn't use stealth kills much anyway. He has a fun gimmick; when you taunt an opponent, their attacks are strengthened and they attack faster but they are weakened significantly. It adds a nice risk-reward factor to things. Also I found that parrying often was practically a necessity with the way Sam plays, thankfully I got pretty good at using them from the base game so I was mostly fine.

This DLC campaign gets a solid 4 stars from me. I don't have a whole lot to say about it given its very short length and the fact that it doesn't change things up too much from the base game (considering how fun playing through the regular story is, though, I do not consider that a problem at all).

So, I've owned Battletoads (2020) since the day it released. I was super excited about it...before that reveal at E3 2020 of what the game actually looks like. A combination of that and the mostly negative feedback this game has received made me uncertain of if I ever wanted to actually play it. Now, almost two years after its release, I took the time to sit down and go through the whole game. I was able to beat it in one sitting since it is pretty short, the game says my time was 4 hours and 37 minutes. Honestly, I found the game more enjoyable than I thought I would.

I think the part where Battletoads (2020) loses most people is the way the gameplay is structured. Don't get me wrong, I think the controls are excellent and the game was overall fun to me all the way through. The issue lies with the fact that Battletoads (2020) has a couple different styles of gameplay that it cycles between for stages: beat-em-ups, glorified quick time events, 2D platforming with puzzles mixed in, and arcade style ship shooters. The beat-em-up levels are probably the most enjoyable to me, but I did enjoy the other ones (and the ones I didn't enjoy were usually short enough for it to not sour the experience anyway). Nonetheless, when people think Battletoads, they tend to think only of beat-em-up stuff, so, if you're going into this game just for that, you're going to feel duped. I actually felt that some of the different styles felt fitting for this series, though. I think people tend to forget that the Battletoads games of old tend to have some weird gimmicky levels too. My only real problem with it is that I think they went too wild with it in this game. I think the spaceship shooter stages, some of the quick time event stages, and the 2D platforming stages felt unnecessary (though there was one platforming stage I really enjoyed).

The story of this game isn't really anything special, but that works well for it. The story really felt like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon to me, it rarely takes its story seriously and of course the style of the game gives off that vibe. The humor is very hit or miss, I didn't find any of it worthy of laughter but I think it was relatively charming in its own way (some of it is cringy and feels too focused on modern age kids though). I'll just give a relatively brief synopsis of the story: basically, the Battletoads find out that the events of their previous games were a result of a simulation they had been stuck in for around 25 years or so. They find their way out and have to live in the real world for a bit, settling down and getting jobs (of course they made a quick time event stage out of this). It doesn't take long for them to get back into adventure, since Rash devises a plan to find the Dark Queen. The Battletoads steal turbo bikes from some nearby store and use them to go...somewhere. I might've just not been paying attention, but I don't think the story specifies where they even went and there's even a joke about that. The Battletoads find the Dark Queen and she offers to team up with the Battletoads since they need to work together to defeat powerful villains called the Topians. The Battletoads and the Dark Queen steal a spaceship from a boss they beat and use it to explore the galaxy and get closer to the Topians. Of course, in the end, the Battletoads beat up the Topians with the help of the Dark Queen. There's a lot more that happens, but I make long enough reviews as it is. I see no need to make them longer by dropping a whole plot synopsis.

I want to give a quick shoutout to the music of this game. As much as the visual style and story really does not feel like a Battletoads game to me, the music is spot on and great even out of context. I was listening to it for a good while and it was part of what inspired me to finally give this game a chance. It even has some remixes of old Battletoads tunes in there.

I genuinely think this game would have been received much better if it wasn't a Battletoads game. I'm not a huge Battletoads guy myself, but this 2020 reboot really just does not feel like Battletoads, especially in the story and art style. Its a shame since I think both of those qualities of this game are great; I love how the art style pops with vibrant colors and the exaggerated character designs. The shapeshifting powers of the toads were put to pretty good use, but many aspects of the Battletoads series were just not well-utilized or even mentioned. Why is there no Professor T. Bird when he's been in almost every Battletoads game? Also, every character that is not a 'toad or the Dark Queen is a weird looking alien and that approach just does not feel fitting for Battletoads in my opinion. I really think they should have kept most aspects of this game the same, but replace the Battletoads and Dark Queen with some original characters. I don't know how much say Rare had on this game, though I'm assuming the main decision maker here was Dlala Studios since it seems like Rare is pretty laidback with their IPs nowadays. If I'm right about that, Dlala Studios could have made this an original IP instead.

Okay, I think I've prattled on long enough. This game gets a decent three stars for me. Its pretty fun and has many aspects that I like, but it isn't really anything special and I feel being a Battletoads game only hurts it. Of course, I also did have some gripes with it, but the game was mostly a positive experience for me. Glad I gave it a chance.

Dedede's Drum Dash Deluxe is one of those quirky 3DS Kirby spin-off games that not a lot of people seem to care about. Seems to be pretty similar to the likes of Kirby Fighters, Kirby's Blowout Blast, and Team Kirby Clash Deluxe, except two of those got Switch versions (and even a sequel in the case of Kirby Fighters) while Dedede's Drum Dash Deluxe has been left to rot as an exclusive to the 3DS eShop. It's a real shame honestly, this game feels pretty unique and I don't think it deserves to just officially die out in a month from now when the shop closes. I mean, emulators will always keep it alive, but I think Dedede's Drum Dash Deluxe could make for a nice port for HAL to put on the Switch. It doesn't rely on any 3DS features that the Switch doesn't also have (aside from the whole gimmick of Dedede's jumps making him go up to the top screen at times but that definitely isn't necessary to keep).

Also, just as a disclaimer: I have always been pretty terrible at rhythm games, so this is coming from the perspective of a total rhythm idiot. I tried my hardest to get the platinum medal on every course, which I managed to do for all of them...EXCEPT the final level. I don't think I can ever do that one without spending a ton of time attempting to master it, so I figured I'd just take the basic gold medal and leave it at that.

For those who don't know, Dedede's Drum Dash was a side-game in Kirby Triple Deluxe. This game essentially is just an expansion with more levels and some small extras like masks you can slap on Dedede's magnificent mug and viewable trophies you get for reaching milestone scores in the game. I imagine the trophies were included partly as a Miiverse boasting thing, but...well, yea that's long since been shut down. Anyway, I remember Drum Dash was by far my favorite side game in Kirby's Triple Deluxe at the time it came out but I barely remembered anything about it, so this expanded version was a nice memory jogger. Its sort of a rhythm game and an obstacle course type of game, where the terrain is a bunch of drums you jump off of and you have to avoid hazards along the way. The rhythm part is in how the levels are structured, which tends to go along to the beat of the music, as well as a backbeat you need to keep track of if you're looking to get the platinum medals. Press A at a certain timing in Dedede's jump arcs to do the backbeat. Seems simple, but it gets really hard to keep up in the more difficult levels, at least for me. Keeping up a good sense of flow is important; if you just barely graze a drum or land on the far side of it, Dedede will be sent into the air flailing which ruins your backbeat combo. You get a score after beating each level that will get bonuses added to it with each special criteria you fulfill. The criteria includes: Time Bonus, No Damage, All Notes (there are note coins to grab in each level), and Backbeat Perfect.

I have to say, this game has made it to where if I ever hear C-R-O-W-N-E-D again I will immediately think of the pain I felt trying to beat both of the levels with this theme in it. I'm not kidding when I say that I spent two hours late at night to try perfecting the first C-R-O-W-N-E-D level and I still had to try again the next day. Ironically enough, it only took me four tries the next day, so maybe I just really didn't click with it until then. Certainly taught me that I'm still not any good at rhythm games, that's for sure. The other levels also took me anywhere from just a few tries to several attempts to get the platinum for. The other big spot of misery for me was Level 6 of the second set of levels, which was just so difficult to get right for me but did feel satisfying once I finally got the platinum for it after god knows how many attempts. As I mentioned earlier I just completely gave up even trying to get the platinum for the last level, I had a hard time just beating that level normally so I figured I shouldn't go for the platinum or I'd go insane. The thing about Dedede's Drum Dash Deluxe is that, if you just want to finish levels normally, there's pretty much nothing to worry about. So long as you're fulfilling like two of the criteria for getting extra points, you can get up to a gold medal pretty easily and call it a day there. However, if you really want that platinum, well you're going to have to work for it. The problem is that getting in the rhythm of jumping at the right time to get all the notes, getting a Perfect Backbeat, and avoiding obstacles all in one run is ludicrously difficult for me at times. The backbeat especially was the direct cause of so many fails for me, the amount of times I accidentally moved slightly too far and sent Dedede flailing to regain his balance or the times I missed just one beat and had to restart was countless. Some levels were more forgiving than others with the Platinum medals, but for the most part if you mess up once you're not getting it. This isn't too bad because obviously the levels aren't long (aside from the final level which felt like it dragged on for forever), but man when you're as bad at this whole perfect rhythm thing as I can be it's so painful. I did enjoy my time with the game, though; it's a pretty fun rhythm game. I don't want my salty rant for a Kirby game of all things (and one I haven't seen anyone else complain about) to take up the brunt of a review. I like the base idea a lot and there's a surprising amount of content here.

Despite my previous rant, yea I really think this is a solid little game. It's never gonna blow your mind, but it does what it sets out to do well and its charming. I could see this being a gateway for more people to get into a rhythm game since it's Kirby and it stars our beloved king of Pop Star. I'm a little sad I couldn't finish the job in getting the final platinum medal, but I really think I'm better off not doing it. Definitely not gonna lose any sleep over it.