A top-of-the-line puzzle game to this day.

The spritework is lush and gorgeous, bringing Lip and friends' fairy world to life in style. The music is memorable and charming. And of course, the gameplay: it's a brilliantly intuitive tile-matching game with a very precise and gradual difficulty curve. It gets the "low skill floor, high skill ceiling" angle totally right while being consistently encouraging to the player.

Seriously, you should play this game if you haven't. You can play the game in Japanese on NSO, and there's also a translation patch out there.

Even if wasn't originally designed as a sequel to Super Mario Bros., upon comparing the two, I appreciate how much this game improves on SMB1. The four playable characters add a great variety and improve replayability. More varied environments, including vertical platforming sections, help to mix up the proceedings. There's a greater variety of boss fights. And overall, the pace of the platforming is more varied, with some levels still focused on quickly running to the exit but others having more exploration involved.

And hey, if its non-Mario origins show through a bit too much for you, there's always the other SMB2, I guess. For me, though, this is by far the better game.

Just like the castle, this game has two sides.

On the one hand, I quite like how Juste plays. His forwards and backwards dashes feel more comfortable to use than Alucard's backdash, and are useful both for quickly traversing the castle and for positioning yourself in combat. The spellbook system is a great improvement over the similar card system in Circle of the Moon, and helps Juste have a good balance between classic Belmont whip action and more magical options. The equipment situation for Juste is also better than Nathan had in CotM. Visually, I'd say the game looks pretty good for GBA for the most part.

On the other hand, let's see... the actual layout of the castle is full of aggravating locks and one-way passages, and the double-castle is far more annoying to navigate than Symphony of the Night's. The music relying primarily on the chiptune capabilities of the GBA is one of this game's more controversial elements, and while I actually rather like some of the tracks, others are a bit grating and repetitive. The game's story is exceptionally weak, with flat characters and dialogue. The shop system is pointlessly obtuse.

In short, this game is good, but doesn't quite measure up to most of the other exploration Castlevanias.

"Giant alien spiders are no joke." -- person making a bad life decision

An impressive starship roguelite, with intricate ship-to-ship combat, careful trade-offs, a good variety of random events and ship parts (especially with the free Advanced Edition expansion), and a lot of smart design. Being able to freely pause the real-time combat however you want is deeply appreciated, and lets you take your time with planning your tactics. I adore the music, which has a good blend of more ambient and more melodic pieces.

My only major critique is that the difficulty levels feel mis-labeled. What they call Easy / Normal / Hard, I think would be fairer to call Normal / Hard / Very Hard.

It's all been said before about this game, but I'll say it from my own experience. Battletoads has great animation, excellent music, and interestingly varied gameplay and level design. It is also relentlessly, excessively difficult to the point of substantially damaging its enjoyability. Too many of its setpieces devolve into dying over and over and over again to memorize the level layout, because one mistake means death and getting sent back a ways. The margin of error permitted is unreasonably thin.

I absolutely adore this game. Superstar Saga blew my mind as a kid and held up incredibly well when I re-visited it as an adult.

The sprite animation is expressive and charming, the story is an amusingly goofy romp, and the gameplay systems make for an accessible RPG with room for mastery. The flashy Bros. moves challenge you to work on timing button combos, with advanced versions coming along mid-game. Trying to keep up with increasingly tricky enemy counters/dodges keeps enemies interesting all throughout the game. The Beanbean Kingdom feels like a familiar yet distinct spin on the Mario setting, appropriate for a neighbor to the Mushroom Kingdom. There are a ton of optional goodies, minigames, sidequests, and so on. Naturally the music is great as well.

Obviously my feelings are flavored by the nostalgia factor, but for me it is quite simply one of the best Mario games, and one of my favorite games overall.

I really, really enjoyed my time with this game. I appreciated that I could do almost everything on a single, thorough playthrough. Other FE games either put major limits on seeing characters' support conversations, expect you to play the game 2-4 times to see all the story, or both. Awakening hits a happy medium where you can take your time on a single playthrough and not miss out. It's also quite forgiving to newcomers to strategy RPGs, or optionally quite hard if that's more your thing.

The storyline and characters are reasonably interesting, even if they aren't the deepest. And in the parts where they maybe aren't as fleshed out as they could be, the game neverthless does a good job of giving them enough juice to give the player incentive to add their own interpretations to things. I like the artstyle, and the music is excellent.

Also Robin is kind of gender. "Which one?" Yes