A big improvement over the first. Mario Land 2 excels in its creativity, with 6 different zones all far more inventive than generic grass stage, generic snow stage etc. You'll get stages where you're a tiny Mario running through gardens stomping on ants that are now your size, stages where you're in a sunken ship/submarine, a stage in a zone called "Mario Zone" where the stage enterance is on a giant Mario's crotch, and everything inside is ball-shaped. And so much more.

Even the enemies feel much more interesting than the ones seen in normal Mario. There's Jason Voorhees-mask wearing Goomba's in the horror stages!

Not to mention the bosses - there's a 3 little pigs boss.

There's also some mechanics not seen elsewhere in the series, like an enemy kill counter, which, once it gets to 100 gives you a free star and resets.

Only problems I have with this game is that there's some slowdown at times, and the jump physics feel really wonky and inconsistent. Neither one is excess, it's more the fact that they're things that persist the whole time that suck. Though the jumping can be annoying on the last stage, as there's so many precise jumps you need to do.

The last stage in general is crazy. It's a pretty long gauntlet with zero checkpoints - including before the final boss - and only a couple of power-ups. Thank God for the 3DS's save states.

I really wish the New Super Mario Bros. series had taken more inspiration from this game. I'd love a modern take on it.

I really like Violet's characters and story. It can get surprisingly emotional at times. And even Nemona, who doesn't have much development, is a very endearing rival who breaks the mould by actually starting out as a champion so you're not in this adventure together, you're building up to be able to face her at her full power.

Quality of life improvements are all over in this game. Presentation for things like the Pokédex (the book-shelf aesthetic, and each mon having its own photo) is really cool.

But when Gamefreak made this huge open world, they forgot to give you anything to do in it between story events.

Most of this world is just empty fields, mountains and caves. There's very few defining landmarks that make an area stand out (definitely not zero though, things like a bamboo forest, or walking along a narrow cliff road are ok). It kind of says it all that the majority of areas in this game are named things like "West Province (Area One)", because there's jackshit to set it apart from "East Province (Area One)" except being in the west. A lot of the "10 sights of Paldea" are just generic waterfalls that look the exact same as other waterfalls.

Even the towns have almost zero things to do in them except be littered with dozens of food shops and stalls, all of which serve the exact same purpose of giving you 3 buffs in a variety of areas. Which is a shame because a lot of them look nice.

In fact in adding an open world, they seem to have removed a ton of things. The battle tower that has been a staple since Crystal? It's gone. Even elite 4 rematches are gone, and gyms can only be rematched once. The end-game battle facility comes in the form of the "Academy Ace Tournament", which has a very small pool of trainers, and they all max out around level 65-70, so it's pretty useless as an endgame challenge.

So what is there to do in this huge world when you're not focusing on the story? Obviously it's littered with Pokémon, so you can catch them, but this just results in you being massively over levelled. The thing is, some people might say "just rotate your team", but on top of the fact that's not how most of us grew up playing the game because it was never needed as they were balanced around a 6-mon team, there's no reason to do it beyond just trying to fix the developers refusal to give an in-game challenge. If catching Pokémon is all there is to do between story beats, give us a REASON to use more than 6. Taking some examples from the anime, you could have type-tournaments like the Whirl Cup where only water mons were allowed, or the Sumo Tournament where only mons of a specific weight or above were allowed. You could give one of the game paths a restriction where every boss you can't use Pokémon that you used in the last boss, that'd even add a risk vs reward factor of bringing smaller parties to bosses to be not have to train as many mons to beat that path.

Either give us something else to do except catch Pokémon, or balance the game around the idea the player will be catching a lot of Pokémon and getting a lot of exp. Even nerfing the damn exp from catching mons would help (just remove it entirely like it used to be tbh).

The lack of level scaling is another problem with this open world system. There's a very specific order you're supposed to do events in if you want the levels to scale with you, but this order is impossible to know without looking it up - my favourite is that the 6th gym in level order is way up in the north, just a few feet away from another gym, but it turns out that's the 8th gym. The 7th gym that's levelled between these 2 is at the bottom of the map. The way a first time player is likely to tackle these events will mean they'll be facing early-game bosses as their last challenges.

Not helped by this is the horrible trainer AI. My favourite moment came from the very last battle of the main story - which I'll give credit, had FINALLY caught up to me in level again after I steamrolled almost the entire last 50% of the game due to the weird order of things - and what did this final challenge present? A trainer who used a weather-setting move twice in a row. I seriously have no idea what the hell happened. Unless they were choosing moves at literal random there is zero explanation for why the AI would do that.

But even with weird things like that, the AI is straight up coded to play horribly. The terastalization SHOULD be the perfect way for gyms to counter their weakness. Instead every single gym leader just turns their ace into their typical gym type, quite often removing the advantages they'd have otherwise (the normal gym leader uses a flying type as his last Pokémon to counter his weakness to fighting...except becoming a tera normal type is the same as being pure normal, thus making him weak to fighting again). It's even worse for leaders who use a Pokémon that doesn't even begin as their gym type. For example the grass leader's ace is a Sudowoodo. A rock type that is a perfect counter to the fire, flying and ice types you may have been sweeping her team with. The smart thing to do would be to check if the opponent is one of those types, and if so, stay as a rock type. Instead she'll turn it into a grass type 100% of the time, allowing you to just use your fire move to continue one shotting her time without thinking.

All of this resulted in a game that is by far one of the easiest in a series already known for its lack of difficulty.

When it comes to the 3 main story paths, gyms are the same as ever. The tests from SwSh return, and are likewise as varied in their creativity. Some challenges are decent enough for what they are, like an olive-rolling game, a where's Waldo-esque game, or a sled game. Others are basic stuff like "Trainer battles, but double battles". But my least favourite is the damn psychic gym trial. They show you an emotion and you have to press the button connecting to the same emotion. They don't hide what emotion is connected to which button. If they make a sad face or whatever, you press the button that they clearly label with the sad face. They didn't even turn it into a simon says minigame, it's literally just "press the button within 5 seconds".

And why can't we get some variety in gyms to set them apart from regular trainer battles? They need to actually throw in some unique battle mechanics. This isn't a gen 9 exclusive problem of course. Take gen 5 for example though, it introduced a type of battle where all type effectiveness was reversed, and they used this battle only in a single random house used by a non-important trainer. Why wouldn't they use that for a gym battle to set it apart from other trainers? Make gyms interesting!

Team Star battles are fairly fun. The car that each of them use seemed powerful for their levels, despite how much it lacks originality to face it 5 times. But the part leading up to the bosses where you need to beat 30 grunt mons is one of the worst parts of the game. It's literally just "Press R to win", and even if you did happen to get low on health, there's free healing all over the map.

Titans are kind of like totem mons from gen 7, except instead of them getting an extra Pokémon to help them, you have the help instead. So yeah, they're easy too.

So I dunno... It's fun enough for the story, and like always there's a ton of new Pokémon to grow attached to. But it feels like such a vanilla Pokémon game. This is no different than if Pokémon Red and Blue, the obviously most basic games in the series, made their routes massive but didn't add anything to them. I'd rather have a linear story if this is the extent you're gonna take an open world, because a turn based RPG is the worst kind of game to be badly balanced like this.

You can give yourself one of the biggest possible challenges you've ever had in Pokémon by going for the hardest areas first, but you'll have to accept the remaining 90% of the game will be one of the easiest challenges you've ever had in Pokémon.

This also continues Gamefreak's trend of over-casualising the games by removing Set battle mode. You can add the option to turn off battle animations in to the list of removed features too.

Comparing it to Legends Arceus, I can definitely see now why that game focused so much on the catching and filling out the Pokédex aspect over the battles. I wasn't super thrilled with Legends, but I can respect that it did what it wanted pretty well. While this is a style I much prefer, but done pretty badly. So saying which is better is kind of hard.

As I continue to think of things to ramble about - battle animations took a huge dip in Legends Arceus thanks to the lack of a static camera, which was one of the few things from that game that they brought over. Just compare the Seismic Toss animation in SwSH to this game.

I didn't mention the bugs and shit until now because there's no point. We all know the game runs horribly, there's nothing I can add to that.

The main thing I'll say about this game is, if you haven't already played it, only play it if you're the kind of person who likes to experience the history of games and/or are a completionists who likes to play through whole series. As a game by itself, it, understandably, hasn't aged super gracefully, being a Game Boy platformer from 1989. The novelty of Mario on a handheld has far evolved (not to mention even just the sequel to this game on the same platform is better).

But I don't wanna shit on this game too much. The controls, while a bit slippery, are serviceable enough. The music is great. I like what they do with the levels, having them inspired by real world locations, like having Easter Island heads in the background, which carries over to the enemies, like having Sphynx's shooting fireballs. They definitely wanted this game to have its own identify beyond just "Super Mario Bros but with worse hardware".

Probably the biggest surprise to classic Mario fans will be the 2 (out of 12) levels that aren't platformers at all, but rather side scrolling shooters. It's a decision I don't understand at all, but it's fun. One of those levels also just happens to be the very last one. The levels work fine, it's just something that feels so out of place when less than 1/4th of the game is even in this style. Maybe having one per world would have fit better. In any case they're far more fun than traditional underwater levels, which are absent here (because the only underwater level in the game happens to be replaced by a shooter in a submarine).

An obviously divisive game where if you ask someone their opinion I wouldn’t be surprised to hear anything from 1-10.

I personally found it a mostly enjoyable experience, but a very flat one. The loop of exploring islands never gets any different from the very first one, and even that one isn’t too exciting. Like the mini-games you play to unlock the map fragments range from appropriately enjoyable bite-sized chunks of entertainment, to weirdly easy like “walk through these rings with a time limit so high you could run around the map before doing it, to downright pointless challenges like “parry the bullets 3 times”. If you didn’t know, parrying has no timing to it in this game. You just hold shoulder buttons, wait to be attacked and get the parry. It’s overpowered in combat, so as a “challenge” it’s hilariously bad, like, it’s literally the game asking you “can you press L1 and R1?”.

The other main challenges you’ll find in the world are the cyberspace levels. These generally (or all?) take the layout of past Sonic games. Sounds like an ok idea, if a huge derivative of Sonic Generations, but Frontiers has a unique physics in these stages that just feels horrible. It’s so slow and heavy. And for some reason despite taking levels from the series history, there are a total of 4 level themes used for every cyberspace level. So I guess if you wanted to play a really bad version of Sonic Generations, this game is for you!

Movement in the actual open world areas is pretty fun, especially as you upgrade your speed - which tbh is kinda pointless since getting max rings will automatically put you at top speed. Losing rings outside of big fights is hard, and even if you do? Well just use the loop thingy and run in tiny circles for 30 seconds and you’ll get infinite rings to get back up to top speed. But anyway, even though the movement is fun, there’s little substance to it all. Most of the time in these islands you’ll just be going through auto-play segments where you bounce on springs and grind on rails. Very occasionally you’ll find a structure that will require you to perform actual platforming, those are neat.

Some islands though has this horrible gimmick where they have 2D sections just forced in to them when you hit a specific point in the map. You can only exit them by leaving one of the invisible walls that mark the start and end point of this section. So often you’ll be moving forward, accidently enter a section, killing your momentum and throw you off the track you were going.

Enemies are a pretty strong point of the game for the most part. Even basic enemies have some thought put in to them and require different uses of Sonic’s moveset to beat – though it feels like they’re too scared to assume players have unlocked any of Sonic’s extra moves, even late game enemies only require a starting moveset of basic attacks, cyclone, stomp or parry.

Guardians are my favourite though. They’re mini bosses that all have their own mechanics. Could involve an on-rails running section where you dodge projectiles until you catch up to the enemy, or a literal rails section where you have to colour the rail by grinding on it, and once it’s fully lit up you can attack, and many more.

Bosses are basically just big gurdians, but now you play as Super Sonic. I feel like they generally work worse than guardians since a lot of them have an overreliance on the overpowered parry move, or quick time events.

The funniest thing has got to be how the true final boss takes the form of a mini-game you’ve played about 3 times to that point. It’s not a particularly bad mini-game (it’s a bullet hell shooter), but it’s funny that the very final challenge of the game forgoes the main mechanics to focus on something you’ve barely done which is completely different to the main gameplay.

The thing I love most about this game overall is Sage. As a design, as a character and as a way to develop Eggman. If there was ever a time to let Eggman stop being a series wide villain and become a more neutral character, if not side with Sonic, it’d be…well Sonic Adventure 2, but now’s a good time too.

The story in general is serviceable, but not too interesting. I’m not a fan of how it’s all laid out though. Collect some of this islands tokens (which are scattered literally everywhere), run to the next story point, listen to 2 minutes of dialogue and then repeat. Maaaaybe play a mini-game if you’re lucky. The game has “side stories” which take the form of this exact method, the only difference being they don’t advance the plot, they’re just optional bits of dialogue Sonic can have with his friends/Sage. I mean they’re fine enough if you want to see the characters interact, it’s just weird to me that the main story is progressed in the exact same way you get some minor conversations.

The game does have a reputation of being a more mature Sonic game, where cheesy lines are forgone. It’s kind of true, but you’ll still hear such phrases as “Well, that just happened” or “Those were definitely words you just said”.

In general I found the story to be mostly fluff. There’s some nice bits of dialogue between Sonic and his friends here and there, and one good cutscene, but I found Sage and Eggman’s relationship to be the best part. And THAT was largely reduced to voice memos found in a freaking fishing mini-game.

Is it the best 3D Sonic game in the last 10 years? Maybe actually, I haven't played a single one since Generations lol. But I definitely don't think it comes anywhere close to that game.

Resident Evil made a jump to a new console generation, and omg, the backgrounds scroll as the characters move now! It's still the fixed camera angle though which imo hasn't been effective as a horror tactic since 2 at the latest.

This game, man. Part of me wants to call it the best Resident Evil game up to its release, because it acts as a great sequel to 2, paying off Claire's story in that game (whereas 3 was just kind of a standalone game that didn't do anything for the lore as a whole, or even Jill's individual story besides just...she survived another zombie invasion). This game is WAY more character focused in general, with 2 human enemies who have prominent roles, including the return of Wesker himself. The tyrants in these games have always been mutated humans, but this is the first game where we see a character we've known and cared about (maybe) turn in to one. Like, personally I wasn't a big fan of Steve, no thanks to his English voice, but having him be a monster, even just for a minute, was a great dramatic turn.

Alexia is in a similar position to Birkin in 2, we never personally knew her as a human, but we hear her backstory so much that there's still a human element to her. But like Birkin by the time she actually comes into the story, she's a mutant and has no personality or lines.

But I think my favourite monster in this game has to be Nosferatu. This is all thanks to his great introduction where he's foreshadowed through notes you can find, then you first see him from the grating in the floor. But when you first meet him for real, he's coming up the stairs - your only escape route - through a thick cloud of fog. It's such a great moment that imo far surpasses the final boss who is just another "turns in to a huge blob of flesh, ooo scary".

Anyway, despite all this, I can't call it my favourite because the gameplay just isn't that good. There's good individual locations in this game, but the way they're all put together just feels so messy. There's no hub areas like most past games (except maybe 3), combined with huge scale buildings like the training facility that have you backtracking all the damn time. Combine this with the fact puzzles in this game tend to be way more obtuse and it's just a frustrating first time experience.

I imagine this game is way better on repeat playthroughs.