If your favourite part of the main game was stopping to read documents every 5 minutes then I have amazing news for you.

For real your enjoyment of this DLC will depend entirely on how much you care about learning about the Croft family history.

Edit: This used to be a sole page for Blood Ties DLC, but it's now updated to include a full celebration pack which had "Lara's Nightmare" too. Unfortunately it's been too long for me to properly review the mode, but I did remember it being pretty fun if not repetitive towards the end.

Bigger in just about every way from its prequel. The only thing it doesn't really do more of is the cinematic action, which is only because the original game blew its load so much on that part that any subsequent game would struggle to even match it, much less expand on it.

Otherwise you've got a longer game, bigger areas, more combat and exploration options, more skills, more wild animals (despite hunting still feeling like an afterthought), all put into a plot which is...surprisingly similar to the first one, right down to the whole fighting an immortal army near the end.

But making everything bigger comes with a few flaws. There are 2 particuarly huge areas in the game, and they decided to shoehorn some optional missions in these areas. They feel very out of place.

A bigger game also means way more collectibles. Documents/audio logs have always been a good way to add some extra lore and even foreshadowing for players who pay attention, but this game, like so many others, go overboard and throw in so many that they kill the pace every 5 minutes and are full of filler. Obviously they are ignorable though, so unless you're like me who feels the compulsive urge to fill every section of a map in games, it might not be a problem for you. Also fast travel points aren't always generous if you need to backtrack to collect stuff.

I ended up 100%'ing the main game, but I mostly ignored score attack which is why it isn't set to mastered. Score attack itself is a fairly fun idea, and I could see a lot of people getting more invested in that than even the main story, but I just didn't have the energy to do it after I was done with everything else.

I think with all the improvements this game does come out better than the 2013 game, but it has some extra fat that could be trimmed, and a suspiciously similar plot that feels lazy.

This game seems to put itself as a cinematic showcase first and foremost, because while the gameplay is rarely ever bad, it's pretty basic and doesn't offer much to stand out (plus relies a lot on QTEs), the cinematics are amazing. This game is a truly explosive action adventure.

Most of the puzzles are pretty easy, but the optional tombs offer some slightly more satisfying ones.

And look, I'm not saying this game is better than Uncharted, but my dumb monke brain prefers to play as Lara.

It's picross. That's the long and the short of it.

The Mario theming didn't seem to play into it very much, I did 5 of Mario's levels and I don't think any of the pictures were Mario-related.

I do think there could be some quality of life things, like when you've cleared a row it could auto-mark the rest as X and highlight the letters in red so you didn't need to do that yourself every single time because that just slows it down for me. Obviously that wouldn't work in the Wario stages, but I think it'd be fine for the Mario ones.

My plan is to hopefully complete this slowly over time because trying to play it as a normal games gets too repetitive.

A pretty fun game, but doesn't really have any modes for staying power. It has "classic" mode which let's you play against 1-3 opponents, or "challenge" mode which...let's you play against 1 opponent? I don't really know what the difference is. The lack of any online mode sucks.

I also had no idea this was even a real card game beforehand. There is some benefit over playing this via the game rather than real life, like the computer doing the work with counting points, but I feel like if you're playing with a friend then it's just more fun to play it normally. This works as a training ground I guess. It's pretty cheap, and I got it as part of a bundle, so not much loss, I just wish it had anything to do beside face CPU opponents with no progress (except achievements if you wanna count them, and tbf they do have a little achievement room where unlocking them fills in pictures in the room).

The strongest aspect of Yoshi’s Story is how much control it gives the player over how much they want to do, and rewards them appropriately. It’s a very short game, there are only really 6 levels you can play through, but each level is represented by a “page”, and each page has 4 possible levels, making a total of 24, so you’d need a minimum of 4 playthroughs to play them all. The thing is, other than page 1 which has all 4 unlocked at once, you need to earn levels 2-4 on every other page by collecting hearts in levels. 1 heart found in page 1 = 1 level unlocked in page 2. This means the amount of theoretical content you can get is directly proportionate to how much exploration you do. Want to rush through the game and only play level 1 one each page? That’s an option. Want to play all 24 levels? Then you have to go out of your way to find every heart in whatever level of the prior page you’re doing. And if you want something in-between, like 2 playthroughs with different levels in each, that’s available too by some very light exploration.

This also acts as a subtle difficulty mode, as the difficulty of the levels seems to increase the higher the number (so level 1 in page 1 is easier than level 4 in page 1).

Exploration rewards don’t just stop at hearts though. The game technically has 4 endings, and although the only real difference is that the words in the final cutscene are changed a bit, it’s still nice to have score milestones to shoot for rather than just existing for trying to beat your own score. Getting this maximum score basically requires you to get only melons, which is the highest scoring fruit. These are of course usually harder to get than all the regular fruit, being hidden, in hard to reach places, or even require minigames. Unfortunately it also requires my least favourite mechanic which is “sniffing”. Press R to sniff the ground, and sometimes you’ll find a hidden item. There’s rarely any tell when a good time to try and sniff is, so if you want to find these hidden items it tends to just be a lot of stopping your progress to press R, which is the kind of mechanic I dislike in games. Luckily it’s ignorable if you’re not going for that top score.

A melon-only run also adds extra difficulty since gaining health is harder as your fruit options are limited.

Like most Yoshi games it chose an art style that lets it age gracefully.

I thought the lives system working with the in-universe reasoning was neat (1 life = 1 actual Yoshi, all of different colours). As a side note, I’m not sure why this game gets a reputation of being baby easy. Like it’s far from the hardest game, but there’s quite a lot of things that can one shot you (bottomless pits, being crushed, enemies like the giant fish that can swallow you whole). If you only wanna play through all the first levels of each page, collecting only the easy fruit, then I guess it’s easy, but the game has difficulty options that aren’t tied to just a simple menu choice. The bosses are all piss easy though, even the last boss.

Honestly I just had a good time with the game. I will even say the horrible sin that I probably like this more than Yoshi’s Island. It only really loses out on being much shorter, even when all levels are taken in to account and having less memorable music. At least there’s no crying baby.

A big improvement to the original, but still somewhat flawed by the whole tag duel system. You no longer have to gain a relationship with characters to choose your partner, now it's done at the very start, and gaining hearts progresses the story. I was a little worried at first since I thought this meant every duel in the game would be a tag duel, but the game actually let's you choose single or tag duel for all opponents, which makes it an improvement on the original which only allowed tag duels on sundays, and then during the latter parts of the story.

The story is told via 8 "events" per hearts filled. The weirdest part about this is that the first 4 events are not only the same regardless of who you choose, but they're even single duels. This means only the last 1/4th of any given characters "story" is actually about them, and you're only forced to duel with them 4 times in the entire game.

Of course you're likely going to want to team up with your partners during specific other times. Sundays are still tag-only duels if you want to participate in them, and you can get some big rewards for beating the Sunday "tournaments" (beat 5 opponents in a row). Likewise the class tests, which I think happen randomly? Not sure, after the initial test portion (which btw is waaaaay more fun than the first game) has you tag duel. You can theoretically skip these too since I think if you "end day" before class time it'd skip the exam, but you're actually forced into the exam if you get to that point, and you won't know it's coming, so I guess it's semi-forced, but generally speaking, unless you want to, tag duels only make up a tiny part of the game. Which is pretty good, because the starting line up of possible partners is still only the major characters, so your deck options if hoping to synergise is very low. You can edit your partners deck once you reach event 4, but they have key cards you can't remove, so the best you can really do is make theirs a hybrid deck that works with yours, if you don't wanna use their deck-type.

Partner AI in this game is soooo bad though holy shit. I have seen my partners ram a 3000 attack monster into an opponents "your opponent will take any battle damage from this card" card and lose us the duel. While I could kind of understand if they just didn't know how to use cards they don't originally use, my partner (Tyranno Hassleberry) straight up made the dumbest fucking decisions from his unedited deck. I saw him tribute a 3000 attack dinosaur to activate "big evolution pill" (a card which lets you tribute a dinosaur so you can summon any level dino without tributing for 3 turns) and then summon a level 4? I swear to christ the partner AI is a straight up handicap in this game, and I don't notice it being nearly this bad on the opponents. If the AI knew how to duel even somewhat competently, I might have given this game 4 stars.

Anyway there's some QoL improvements that were good - Unlocking packs is now more flexible, with multiple ways to unlock certain ones. There's also more ways of gaining cards in general, AND BP is rewarded in much higher amounts.

There's also a few things from the original I didn't like which still exist. Animations still can't be customised, so if you wanna watch something like only life point and summon cutscenes, you're out of luck unless you also want "My turn!" and card drawing cutscenes every turn. One big bonus though is that boss monster animations CAN be activated by you now! Too bad there's no way to have them on without duelists animations.

The card converter still kind of sucks and requires a guide to make any use out of. It realllllly needed a way to like "Insert X amount of spare card copies at once" button instead of having to add them one by one.

Overall it's a fun game though. Less grindy than the original, and though the story was nothing amazing, having it be different for each character encourages replay value a lot more.

Oh and every motherfucker in this game uses Snatch Steal, which got annoying very fast.

First time ever playing Panel De Pon. Or Tetris Attack or whatever name it happens to have in English at any given time. It's a pretty fun puzzle game, easy to play, hard to master, that type of thing. The Pokémon skin over it all is...odd. Like they don't implement any of the actual Pokémon mechanics - moves, super effectiveness, catching, etc. The Pokémon you choose just acts as the backdrop of the stage and has the sound effects. I get that making RPG mechanics in a puzzle game might be broken, but why choose an RPG to base the game around then? Just use Yoshi again or something if you're too scared to use the real Panel De Pon characters. At least the anime music is pretty cool to have.

Also I know there's a "story", but having only Ash be playable, and then only 3 of his Pokémon be available to play is kind of lame. Like you're already doing next to nothing with the Pokémon, at least let me choose between his full kanto roster. Funnily enough you can't even choose other characters in the other various 1 player modes, as they don't have selectable Pokémon at all. So I think choosing from the wide cast is only available in 2 player mode? Admittedly I never checked that much.

Anyway I am terrible at these games. I have no eye for setting up chains, and definitely no reaction speed to put them into place. But even with that in mind, the difficulty in this game is WILD. Easy mode was of course easy, but then I got roadblocked hard by Gary, the first battle, on medium. I almost gave up, but after finally beating him I managed to stroll through the rest of normal with little difficulty outside of Erika, weirdly. Then hard mode came and I got all the way to Blaine without a single loss, but Blaine beat my ass multiple times in a row. I didn't win a single battle in one try after that, but it varied between 2 tries or many many tries. I guess you could say it's consistent that the difficulty ramped up at the end there, but, for example, with Loreli, after multiple ~3 minute matches where I kept losing, I had one game where she just lost in 18 seconds. And I didn't do anything special in that game. Maybe there's a mercy counter or something, but if that's the case then even that isn't consistent because some opponents seemed to have their "easy" match way faster than others. There were also games where I managed to pull off some pretty crazy chains (mostly by accident tbh) and the opponent recovered like nothing, while the winning game would be me doing nothing but getting a few 4 block combos. I don't get this difficulty at all, it's like the difficulty is mostly RNG, but the difficulty you select is more like the "highest" RNG it will pick.

Trying to get through npc dialogue felt pretty clunky too.

So a decent puzzle game, with a lazy Pokémon implementation and a difficulty that makes no sense. Lots of modes at least if you really wanna go deep into it.

A pretty weirdly paced game. It's split into 3 parts, and part 1 is basically just a huge grinding section where you get BP for the packs you want, and raise the affection of the person you wanna be your tag duel partner. You can technically make this last as long or short as you want since you can skip days immediately by going to bed, while you can also theoretically make it last infinitely because time only passes when you move to a new area (and you can just free duel on the menu for DP without even worrying about time at all). They do add a toooon of generic npcs to cover a massive variety of deck types with all kinds of skill levels, so you're never lacking in variety.

The actual choices of partners in tag duels feels too limiting. In your first playthrough it's only the main 7 characters. Since you're gonna need to team up with them, if you want a deck that synergises well, your choices for deck builds will be pretty limited. More duellists do open for tag partners in new game plus though, if you really wanna replay over and over.

Part 2 of the game puts you with your official tag partner and then you have to grind again to get "GX medals". You need 90 and you tend to get 1 or 2 from most duels, with 5 being the max in very rare cases, so this is a long grind. You can also lose medals if you lose a duel, which may happen because not only does your tag partner Ai kind of garbage, but they go first 100% of the time. If they don't want you to just OTKO every time so it doesn't feel like a tag duel, I have no idea why they didn't randomise it or something. Once you've got the 90 medals you enter the finals. Which is literally just dueling one pair of duelists you've probably dueled about 10+ times by now, walk through a hallway and duel another until the end. No special presentation or anything.

And then you get part 3, which brings in an actual story out of nowhere. I think it's an arc from the actual show, but essentially this part has no grinding (unless you wanna go out of your way to do it). It's just 1 story duel after another until the final boss. Probably a total of 8 duels in this part.

I don't know why this really set it up this way. Part 1 feels so dull with nothing to really do except grind. You get the occasional school exam, which earns you nothing for getting 100% on, but otherwise I can only think of 1 single story event in the entire 90 or so days you need to get through, which is a "duel festival" duel against Dark Magician Girl.

I guess the big thing about this game is that it has anime-style cutscenes during duels, and they actually look pretty cool. They do get verrrrry repetitive though. You can turn them off, but I wish there was some kind of customisation option so you could only keep certain ones on. Like do we really need a "My turn" animation, followed by half a second back to the duel field then a drawing animation?
Plus some boss monsters have special animations and I'd have liked to keep those on even when I turned off the main duel animations, which after I got tired of them, was 95% of the time outside of certain big duels near the end.

Oh and your own character doesn't even get any animations which is dumb. Even worse, you can't even get the boss monster animations even though there's no duelist in those ones, and they already exist so why not just play them when you summon the monster?

As for the cards themselves, it's a pretty good stage of the games life. There's not a whole bunch of specific archtypes, but you get a massive amount of cards around specific playstyles, attributes and types, so the deck building is fun.

Pack unlocking is a bit weird though, and many of them are unavailable until you've already beaten the game once.

Basically this is a fun Yu-Gi-Oh game for fans of the era, but the heavy grind nature of the game, with little to break it up for the first 9/10th of the game can make long sessions feel a bit monotonous though. If you just want to play some old Yu-Gi-Oh against some CPU, want to be able to make and face a lot of decks then this is a great game, especially if you wanna feel like the anime with the cutscenes on. Of course I imagine the sequels more or less make this one pointless for that purpose, but we'll see when I eventually play them!

A very easy to learn, but very hard to master type of game.

The game is a visual masterpiece. Like it was pretty fun at first, but once I got to the Begin Again stage my mind was blown.

The music is also pretty good, though admittedly I found it hard to really tell a lot of the non-lyrical tracks apart since they all share the same style and a lot of them are in levels that aren't even 1 minute long. In fact the game is very short in general, like a couple of hours, so the fact it has 23 levels really tells you that the majority of them will be over in no time.

The game is super replayable though if you want to 100% it.

While I couldn't describe every single level as a truly unique experience, most of them were. Especially in the latter half.

One complaint I had was that with all the crazy camera angles it could sometimes be hard to judge depth properly.

It's just a very short, very beautiful experience, I don't know how else to describe it.

The last "boss" can go f himself though. Felt way too trial and error.

Considering this was a Nes game, and Kirby's first game with copy abilities, I was expecting there to be only a few basic ones, so I was pleasantly surprised to see such cool ideas like tornado, ufo and wheel already here.
Bosses are really fun, and the soundtrack is great.

Unfortunately the game has performance issues. Some of the worst slowdown I've ever seen that affects pretty much every level. And there's an annoying delay after pretty much every button press, sometimes it's small, but for actions likes sucking, or exhaling air while flying, it feels like you lose control of Kirby for way too long, often leading to unavoidable hits or falling into pits.

It doesn't matter how good of an idea the game is, if it runs like shit, it's not fun to play. Luckily there's other ways to play this game, including a remake on GBA.