The best way I can think to describe this game is by first going all the way back and quoting my review for the Wii game:

"It's full of personality too. Every single character you can choose to put on your team is different. You've got different stats obviously, something like 4 different categories, but each team captain has their own unique item, each sidekick has their own unique special shot, each character has different theme music that plays when they score a goal, and different dodge animations (which itself is different per character class, with some being more offensive, some being able to bypass the goalie with the right timing etc). It just really helps feel like every character you pick makes your team personalised to you, rather than just generic characters with a Mario skin."

All of this is gone, except for the stats (and even those can be adjusted to basically make every character whatever you want them to be). Everything else just...gone. No more sidekicks in general, no unique special shots, no character-specific items, no theme music for goals, no unique dodge techniques. Personality has at least survived with some things like animations, but it's all aesthetic and there's essentially zero gameplay differences between the tiny roster of 10 characters.

Quoting from my old review again though:
"My main issue is with the super strike mechanic. While this also plays into the idea of the game making each character unique, by giving them characteristic animations during the move, it is way too powerful and slows the game down every time it's used. I think it would have been fine if it was just limited to once per match, including the set-up screen, so that if you tried to use one at a bad time, you're out of luck. It'd add a lot more strategy and give it a huge risk-reward factor, while right now it's just no reward-reward."

This has at least been changed. No more spamming super strikes for 5 easy goals. Now you can only do them when a special item appears, and they only give you 2 goals. They still kind of break the pace when using them (unskippable 30 second or so cutscenes), but generally they're a big improvement here.

Anyway moving on to things unique to this game - Holy shit the way they handled customisation. So they have some pretty cool ways to alter the look of your side of the field, things like the look of the goal posts, the electric barrier pattern, the scenery items outside the barrier etc. But you can ONLY do these as part of a striker club. And only the leader of a striker club can alter them. Like you can still use your clubs field outside of club mode, even in story mode, but for some reason there's no way to just...make field designs you want. It makes zero sense. Have it so you can only use your clubs field specifically when doing club matches, but why the hell would you not let us make our own fields for single player and quickplay matches?

You might think "Well I'll just make my own private club so I can make a field how I want". Except nah, because on top of the obvious disadvantage you'd be in for ranking with a club with only 1 member, you can't actually do proper club matches like this (which you need for currency to buy customisation parts). The characters you can select in club matches are exclusively the ones the players of a club have registered as their character in said club (including their gear). So you can use YOUR character, but if you're the only one in a club it'll fill the last 3 with random characters, none of which have gear. So your only choices are to join a club and let the leader pick all the customisation options for you, or be lucky enough to be the head of a club with 19 other people (and hope they bring in good characters to use).

Also club mode launched without even having a current season lmao. Why?!

Anyway here's just a random list of other complaints:
-Zero content. 10 characters. 5 stadium themes that have zero gimmicks (may or may not be a positive to some people), and all the actual pitches are just plain grass. The only single player mode is now a simple bracket tournament with 3 matches across various cups.
-The inclusion of more timing based elements for things like perfect passes and perfect shots sounds good on paper, but in reality it just results in WAY too many goals. Especially combined with being able to min-max any stat you want. Having a max shooting stat with a perfect shot (honestly not hard at all to time) results in a goal from anywhere almost automatically. 4 minute matches will take at least twice as long thanks to the amount of goals.
-Items have been reduced to just the basic 5.
-Stadiums are tiny now.

What's GOOD about the game? Well... it still plays fairly well I suppose. There's still a lot of personality in animations (though I think the amount of possible goal animations per character have been drastically reduced?).

Umm... I dunno what else. This game is such a shell of its former self. They seemed to bank literally everything on the idea people would love being part of a club online, and maybe if you have 19 friends to join that'd be the case, but for anyone who has to resort to joining random open clubs, it's just a bad game with basically nothing to do.

Pros:
+The Colossi look amazing
+Riding around on one, especially the flying ones, is cinematic and incredible-feeling
+The environment looks incredible
+The puzzle elements of the boss fights feels rewarding to figure out for the first time
+The soundtrack is epic

Cons:
-Despite the amazing looking scenery, the world itself is devoid of anything, making going through it 16 times in a row a huge slog, which is made worse by the two following cons:
-The horse controls like crap
-The camera is pretty bad, but especially so while riding the horse
-The fact you need to raise your sword and draw power before you stab makes the CONSTANT losing of grip due to the Colossi moving around unbearable
-Same with trying to climb around the Colossi, as you often manage to make zero progress because your character keeps swaying for like 30 seconds straight
-Too much of the boss fights is just playing the waiting game
-Being knocked down takes way too long to get back up. Especially annoying in fights where the enemy will knock you down, then as soon as you start getting back up they knock you down again, over and over and over.

Mixed:
~The sword acting as a homing beacon is a neat idea, but the vagueness of it just leads to dead ends.

Dead Island 2 gets the zombie killing portion spot on. It's so much with so many different methods. Weapons, both melee and ranged, come in 4 categories, such as "frenzy" or "maiming" each one excels at a different area and gets critical hits in different ways. Then of course you have the actual weapons themselves which can feel different with their speeds, range and so on (so for example a "bulldozer" weapon could be a baseball bat or a sledgehammer).

You can further add variety via perks, including adding an element to them.

You can use environmental hazards to your advantage, though most of them time I found myself just getting shocked or set on fire when trying to take advantage of them. It's also where an area of the game that isn't really expanded upon past the first 2 maps. Like you have electricity, water, acid and fire, but the ways they can interact (setting an oil barrel on fire, drenching a zombie in water then electrocuting it etc) are all shown off very early. It doesn't help that weapons can do most of these faster and better than the environment can, so you'll find these things in the world being more obstacles to yourself rather than tools for killing zombies.

The game does provide a steady flow of other tools for you to use though. Like at the start you just have melee weapons, usually with little to no perks. Then you start unlocking perks, skill cards (perks for your character rather than your weapon), access to ranged weapons, a "special move" and finally full on beast mode.

In other words, there's a ton of ways to kill zombies, and it's a lot of fun.

The amount of enemy variety likewise keeps things fresh. You've got so many types of walking dead. They could differ by simple things like whether they shamble, walk or run (appropriately called shamblers, walkers and runners), but some zombies have elemental elements, like a shocker zombie, dressed up as an electrical engineer, can set off bolts of lightning around itself. Not just offensively, but defensive too - so those shocker zombies are immune to electric weapons, while a firefighter zombie would be immune to all elemental types. This does come with a bit of a downside where due to there being so many zombies immune to all these different types, sometimes it just feels better to make your weapon perk the pure force one with no element, so it can't be resisted by anything, except for things like riot gear zombies which are immune to any damage until you knock their armour off.

The apex zombies are the mini-bosses of the game, which also come in a wide variety. Crushers are huge brutes who slam the floor with their fists, screamers, well, scream, which prevents you getting close, slobbers will spit globs of acid at you etc. They only get better at differentiating themselves when you unlock the ability to harvest zombie parts part way through the game, as each apex will give out different parts, used for some of the better weapon perks.

My favourite aspect of the game though is the huge variety in locales. They chose a great setting for the game. I'd much rather bash zombies heads in in places like huge hotels, pier fairgrounds, beaches, and millionaire houses with pools, than dull grey ruined cities and streets with no landmarks like many games set during a zombie apocalypse. You'll still get some of those darker areas, like the sewers or metro, but they're broken up between much colourful and lively areas.

What can't be said for the variety is the missions. Pretty much all main and side-quests provide little in the way of gameplay changes. They exist purely to tell this games rather mediocre story. While I could understand that with the main missions, the side-quests should really have provided more variety to the usual gameplay loop of "head to area, kill zombies, head back to quest giver". Most of the quests just involve you going to look for someone or something, finding the person the quest-giver talked about is dead and then fighting their zombie self. Rinse and repeat. The only kind I can think of off the top of my head that truly mixed things up is a quest that has you kill off zombies in specific ways, like killing them via fire or electricity. It's such a minor thing too, and that's just how little variety there is.

It doesn't help that it's full of groan-worthy dialogue that I can't tell if it's supposed to be ironic or not. My player character was probably the worst of it, so if you didn't choose Carla maybe you had a better time there.

What also doesn't feel special thanks to not changing things up from the regular gameplay are the bosses. Every single boss in this game is just an apex zombie with a unique name and more health. Granted a lot of the times these are the first time said apex zombie comes into the game, so there's a little bit of a surprise there. But once you beat them, they'll be added to the pool of regular encounters like any other.

So one aspect I find interesting about the game is that stat increases don't come from levels - they come from beating the in-game challenges. Most of these just provide money, but you can get say, extra damage from specific weapon types by killing X amount of zombies with that type of weapon, or more resistance to acid by killing those slobbers who spit acid as mentioned before. It's a very interesting way to get power growth beyond just gaining exp, and promotes fighting as many types of zombies in as many ways as possible.

But it does raise the question of why have an exp and level system at all. There are only 2 things in the game, other than the player, that I can see using levels - the zombies and the weapons. The zombies scale with you, so no matter what level you are, the zombies will never drop below 1 level lower than that. Sometimes you'll find zombies equal, or higher than you, with the odd zombie having a "skull" as its level to indicate "very powerful and can kill you fast". My theory is that every group of zombies has a minimum level, and once you pass that, the zombies will grow with you - until you pass it they will stay at their minimum, and if you're far below it (3+ levels) it will show as a skull. That's fine and all but does it NEED a level system? It's done to gate players from trying to do things out of order, so why not just scale the enemies to player progress instead of levels?

Weapons likewise keep up with you in levels. And it doesn't matter if it's a random weapon on the ground or a special weapon gained from a long scavenger hunt - they'll all be at your level +/-1. Even worse is that these special weapons don't actually have anything special ABOUT them. They do come pre-loaded with some perks, maybe even ones you haven't unlocked yet, but otherwise they seem the same as anything else in the game. Maybe they're stronger, I can't say I compared every stat of every weapon. But the fact they always start at your level means many of them become quickly outclassed. You could use money to "level up" the weapons, but it costs a lot compared to just using material to craft new perks for higher levelled weapons.

It's such a shame too because these weapons are basically the closest thing the game has to exploring the maps. There's very little else to find. You can get materials, journal notes (some of which are pretty fun to read tbf) and weapons. There's a lot of locked boxes where the key is held by a named, and little stronger, but otherwise regular-looking zombie somewhere nearby (not unlike the bosses, but in this case it's fine for them to be regular enemies). It's a fantastic idea, but it lacks any payoff because the reward is a weapon that likely won't differ too much from your current ones, and will be outclassed very fast.

So levels don't provide any benefit in terms of being able to more easily sweep early game areas, or let you access stronger weapons faster. So what's the point? All they do is give you a blueprint for a mod, or a skill card. Those could easily have been tied with challenges like the rest of the player growth.

While I'm complaining I'll just throw in some random QoL stuff I'd have liked:
-A vehicle for backtracking through areas or a way to fast travel without having to go to a safe room.
-A way to sort weapons by most powerful, by type etc.
-Marking which keys you've already used.

The game provides such many fantastic stuff to play with. The arsenal of offense capability, the wide array of different types of things to kill, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and a setting that never gets dull. But it doesn't do anything structured WITH them. It hands you some toys and says "have fun" and when you get a bit bored of mindlessly smashing zombies heads in, you ask for just a bit more to break things up, it just gives you a weak story and says "continue having fun" with no new toys. You wonder if they maybe hid some new toys in the huge sandbox you're playing in. But there isn't.

I had a lot of fun with the game I want to make it clear. I just think it could have been a bit more, and it's more annoying that this game didn't provide it than it would have been if it had been a bad game to begin with.

This game is absolutely packed with references, cameos and easter eggs that rival the newly released Super Mario Bros. movie (this won't age the review at all!).

Seriously though if you were a long-time Mario fan when this game came out, this game would be like the ultimate gift. Even playing it for the first time now, I can still appreciate the insane amount of sources they pulled from to put into the game. Enemies can be anything from generic Mario enemies, to spin-off stuff like the viruses from Dr. Mario, to variations on them (like mechanical dogs with chain chomp heads, scuba diva Goombas or Bullet Bills with Scope Rifles).

Of course it's not only references, the game has plenty of original content, including taking place in a brand new Kingdom to the Mario world, with everything within having a naming scheme that I...didn't really care for, even if it did fit the tone.

The combat is very interesting in this game since every action, offense and defense, requires player input. If you want to get extra damage on your basic attack you need to time it right, and if you want to pull off a special attack at all you'll need to time and input a short sequence of button prompts. You can even set these to your required difficulty level - you can set it to the easiest mode where the timing prompts play in slow motion with the game telling you which buttons to press, or you can set it to hard mode where the timings play at normal speed and don't tell you which buttons to press. The benefits of hard mode is that it takes up less "bro points" to do the move (think MP in any other RPG).

But I think it's the defensive stuff that makes the combat work so great. You can time your Bros. jumps or hammer strikes when an enemy is attacking to either dodge or counter attack. It makes every single enemy feel unique because the way they attack determines how/if they can be countered. It's such a refreshing system that can make even the most simple of battels feel more engaging for a playstyle that many consider slow.

I guess they do rely on this system a bit too much to carry battles though because Mario and Luigi's movesets are pretty lacking. 2 characters is already a small amount for an RPG, and these guys only get a total of 4 special moves (each with an upgraded version) and 3 basic moves, all of which are slowly unlocked over the course of the game. And yet, somewhat contradictory, it feels like these 4 special moves are also "too many". What I mean by that is, there doesn't feel like nearly enough variation in attacks. There's some simple things such as hammers can attack spiky enemies, but for the most part it rarely felt like there was any specific move that fit a specific enemy, so you just go with whatever. Mario also gets fire power and Luigi gets lightning somewhat late in to the game, so you get a grand total of 2 elements to use across this small arsenal. Even these elements feel underutilised, sure I noticed an enemy or two that was weak to, or absorbed one type of damage, but it was never worth it to me to test these elements out when stomping on an enemy was usually good enough to do the job.

There's a few times when Mario & Luigi are split up too, and Bros. moves can't be used in these instances, so in these battles they must be completed with only 3 basic moves.

So the battle system is weird. It's very fun, but very limited. Whether the battle interaction justifies the lack of options is a very tough question.

Moving on, since this is a Mario game, even if it's an RPG, platforming elements still show up. And it's where my biggest issue with the game came from. The GBA only has a few buttons, but there's a LOT of field actions in this game. And not only does every action they can do to interact with the world have an individual effect, but an effect when used on the other brother AND the order the brothers are set in matters. What this means with few buttons is that you're constantly micromanaging which action is set at any one time, and which of the 2 moustached fella's is in the lead. The amount of times I skipped past an action, or rushed and pressed the wrong one so I made Mario tiny by hammering him with Luigi instead of doing the super jump was annoying. It's a very minor annoyance, yes, but it's one that persists throughout the game.

Speaking of that super jump ability, it's easily the worst one because of how unnecessary it is. It's literally just used to get to platforms slightly too high to reach at a regular jump, but why? Why not just make the platforms normal height? It's not like it was done for gating the player off, since it's one of the two first abilities you learn. It has no puzzle or challenge attributed to it. It's like they just needed a filler ability for Luigi to match Mario's spin one, so they then had to justify adding it by throwing in a bunch of platforms that force you to waste just a couple extra seconds to get past. Yes it's a petty complaint.

Let's get back to praising the game. I really liked the soundtrack, which like anything else, has a mix of new stuff, with old remixes.

The game is full of decently fun mini-games, each of which can be replayed after its mandatory play for extra rewards.

A very small thing, but the luck stat in this game is called "moustache". It also gives you discounts in the store if you grow this "mous-stat". It's that kinda thing that just makes the game a joy.

The game is surprisingly not as hand-holdy as I thought it'd be. Like this is babbys first RPG in many ways. It's not hard at all and many systems are simplified, such as equipment pretty much only ever having basic "power/defense/hp/bp(mp)" numbers and then maybe a simple effect added on. But it gives you access to the world map pretty early on. Of course most of it is locked off until you get the required abilities, but it still surprised me that it let the player explore and find this out themselves, rather than railroading them to the next story point. Hell if I'm being honest, sometimes the game gives you so LITTLE direction on what to do next I had to look up a guide on where to go at a couple of points.

Part of me felt like this game had too many tutorials, but I don't think that's true. It does give a new one every time you learn a new ability, so to some people that's too many, but I think the main problem is how SLOW they were. Whenever characters are talking, this game is definitely very slow.

By RPG standards it is, of course, pretty basic. But it's an RPG for Mario fans first and foremost. However the fact that they went further with the gameplay than the simple turn-based battle system just really helped so that I could enjoy the game even after all the Mario fanservice started to lose its effect.

Pretty much the ultimate love letter to any Dragon Ball fan. Featuring a massive cast of characters - even more than any game in the franchise up to this day (except maybe Xenoverse 2 with all its DLC), equally impressive amount of stages and more fanservice than you can shake a stick at.

Unlike a lot of Dragon Ball games this one doesn't just focus on Z and some movies. EVERYTHING from the series at the time is here. Even the original Dragon Ball gets a hefty amount of characters and stages. Even Arale is in this game.

It's not all balanced equally. If you wanted a competitive fighting game, this isn't that. This is a game where characters on the weaker end in the series are equally as weak here. Of course it's set up so you can technically win with anyone (except maybe Mr Satan...) but you'll be doing less damage and taking more playing as Chaozu, or making much slower and easier to counter moves as a giant character.

The lack of focus on any one series does show up in the story mode. In order to fit DB, Z, GT, Movies and even what if battles, stories jump around rapidly. For example we go from Majin Vegeta vs Fat Boo straight to Vegetto vs Boohan. It's a bit weird, and doesn't always make sense with the fights they chose, but the game seemed focused on showing off the sheer amount of scope it has, rather than trying to put the player through the same Raditz-Boo story as most DB games do.

The battles in story mode set themselves apart from regular battles greatly. The team system allows fights like everyone vs Nappa to happen in a single unbroken fight, with characters switching in and out on a button prompt after a certain time has passed, or you've dealt enough damage. Scripted events like beam struggles happen automatically. It's all just great.

Mission 100 provides, as you might expect, 100 event battles, with each enemy team focusing on a theme, like female fighters, Super Saiyans, sword users etc. The last few pages of these are basically boss fights with a single character with buffed up stats. The last of these, SSj4 Gogeta, is the hardest battle in the game and provides a fitting final boss.

Another great example of how much content this game has is the tournaments. The game has 5 different tournament modes, each with its own gimmick based off the series (the regular WT has ring outs, the Cell Games uses a stamina based system, like how Cell intended it to be, and the Yamcha tournament, fitting as it is the most random inclusion due to not being based on a real tournament, makes you use a random character).

My main complaint with the game would probably be the DB collecting. There's only two ways to get dragon balls - either luck out and get one as a prize for winning the tournament via RNG, or play a story mission and break buildings and hope to get one through RNG. So you won't be able to find them during the huge grind through mission 100, and considering you need to summon the dragon many times to get everything in the game, having to grind out getting them through the same story mission over and over is a chore.

Mostly though this game is just an amazing toy for DB fans. It's not balanced, but it has so much content and so many details for DB fans (Saiyan characters that can turn great ape cannot do so unless they are on a night stage, except those that can create an artificial moon like Vegeta), that it remains one of, if not my favourite DB game.

Sunshine is like the polar opposite of 64. This game feels AMAZING to control. It's no coincidence that my favourite parts are the pure platforming sections without Fludd.

The actual content itself is heavily padded though, which is likely due to the fact there's now a measly 7 levels, instead of 64's 15. Every stage has 2 red coin missions, every stage has 30 blue coins to collect (a total of 24 of the 120 shine sprites are from collecting freaking blue coins), every single level has a "chase shadow Mario" mission. Bosses get repeated. Despite each stage having 10 missions (including 2 "hidden" missions, which 90% of the time is just "replay the platforming stage again but this time collect even more red coins), the amount of actual unique ideas here is shockingly low.

Collecting 100 coins in every stage is also back, which is fine, but for some reason collecting that shine will exit you out of the level, meaning unlike in the past game you can't do that mission along with another mission, making it a direct quality of life degrade.

The worst part of all this is that some of the blue coins require a lot of fun or otherwise unused areas and mechanics of the game. If they just fleshed out the good blue coins and made them shines, while removing all the bad ones, it would have improved the game massively.

The game is mostly okay, it just feels like there's 25% good content that is copy/pasted four times to make a full game.

Able to stand toe to toe with the other big collectathon on the N64.

Does many things right for the genre, such as not kicking you out after a level when getting a Jiggy. There's also just generally so much TO collect. Even the main collectable (Jiggy's) are different to the door gates (notes), then on top of that you have new special moves, extra health pieces, a "find 5 of these things in every level" (think red coins but more personality). Admittedly the special moves one can make your beginning set feel a bit limited.

But it does what I want most from these games, the worlds are super fun to explore. Not too big or confusing, but packed with things to find, secrets, and subareas with their own little storylines and/or characters. The game has so many different minigames and challenges for collectables.

The hub world is up there as one of the best. While Peach's Castle is iconic, and beautiful, it does feel very much like just a quick stop between the levels, with a few secret things to discover. But Gruntilda's lair is like an entire extra level in this game that keeps expanding. It is kind of easy to get lost though.

I do have a few nit-picks. The camera is the biggest, it is not forgiving at all.

Another is the fact that collecting all 100 notes has to be done in a single go. If you leave the level or even die, it resets them all (this also applies to anything you can collect in a level, such as the 5 Jinjo's).

Egg shooting can be a very fiddly thing.

Luckily the technical issues don't get in the way of the huge charm, personality and fun that radiates from the writing, characters and music, all in some very well designed levels.

Hard mode DLC for Mario Bros. With too many unfair versions of difficulty, like invisible blocks.

Almost everything from this game is straight from the first game, from sprites to music. Even the less than perfect physics are still here, except now they're worse because the game demands even more tight platforming.

Also the amount of BS looping levels has increased.