Pros:
+While not revolutionary, the game has some quality turn based RPG gameplay, which for me is a fun way to play despite it being a bit ancient.
+Soundtrack is lively and fun.
+Enemy designs are creative and varied. I actually got pretty excited to get to a new area and find new enemies.
+The 2D side-missions (as well as full 2D optional mode) were a nice callback, even though I couldn't truly appreciate them as this is my first Dragon Quest game.
+There's some decent quality of life stuff, like if you're missing purchasable items for forging, you can buy them right there instead of having to go to a shop.
+All the different prep power animations look gorgeous. Also prep powers in general having unique teammate set ups adds some personality to them.
+Toriyama art style. As a huge Dragon Ball fan I had to add this.
+There are a whole bunch of costumes you can find to dress your characters, ranging from silly fun ones, to story-related ones, to downright cool looking ones.
+There's a few times when you get specific moves or skill trees based directly on the happenings from the plot. Like Jade learning Re-Vamp, or Rab's Pearly Gates.
+The main cast are all charming and fun.
+A toooon of content, even post-game. Hell, especially post-game.

Cons
-The way items are managed in this game is awful:
-You can't use any item from the bag in battle. You have to specifically equip it to a character. And it's not like a "Battle bag" either, you have to give each individual item to each individual character. I honestly just gave up on this about 5 hours in and never used an item in battle all game.
-Items don’t merge in a characters bag. If you give a character 5 potions they'll take up 5 slots, which just looks messy and cluttered.
-If you steal from an enemy, it goes into the characters personal inventory, meaning you have to manually remove every single one (there is a way to remove all non-equipment at once, but that would mean removing all the items you want to keep on them)
-The battle music gets overused too much. I don't mean "there's too many battles", but like during the last lap of a horse race it suddenly starts to use the battle music and it feels so out of place.
-When you're looking at a list of items in a shop or forging you can't compare them to your parties current equipment. It'll show only ONE stat of the new item and whether it's lower or higher than the same stat on your party. I bought or forged so many items only to realise the other 5 stats provided are lower than my current one.
-There's too many invisible barriers everywhere. Can't just jump over this little fence to take a short cut, gotta go the long way around.
-The silent protagonist is common in RPGs, but as the story gets more and more involved, and spoken dialogue becomes more common place, it makes them look really out of place. It's so distracting for this huge story to unfold around the main character as he just stands there silent, emotionless. There's one point where he actually starts crying and I was so taken aback because I just can't see him as a character.
-There's no way to find out battle information on enemies like their weaknesses or their immunities. It led to a lot of trial and error, or more likely just avoiding using any status moves and powering through with my strongest attacks rather than waste time experimenting and wasting turns with things that might not even work.

Mixed/Not important enough to be a pro/con:
~Tactics always being the first option that comes up in battle. It’s very very minor but it slows things down a bit for every fight. Since pressing X already brings up the tactics menu there’s no need to have it be the default as the amount of times I didn't want to change my tactics every battle far outweighed the ones I did.
~The variety of rideable enemies you find are fun, but they're so limited and are often just there to solve an easy "puzzle". It feels less immersive when only one out of the thousands of other enemies of the same type you find can be ridable.

Neutral/Notes:
•The game doesn’t pause when using menus. It doesn't really matter at all, it just feels weird to me.
•There's an option for "Heal All" and "Handy Heal All" in the menu. The first option heals your party to full health, the second one does the same thing but "in the most optimised way". I just don't understand why I'd ever want to use the option that heals me in a way that isn't the most optimised.
•The Slime Slot Machine feels way too overly complex for a mini game...

This is pretty much what New Super Mario Bros. should have become after the Wii version.

To be honest more than even the wonder flowers I think my favourite part of this is just how many new enemies appeared. I swear it has the be the most amount a Mario game has introduced. And they're all so different that many levels are based entirely around how they behave.

But the wonder flower thing is great too. Providing all kinds of amusing, fun, challenging moments. Or even making things unchallenging and just letting you feel like a beast. While some ideas do show up more than once it never feels reptitive...except that one where you turn in to a slime. That's a weird one. It shows up in world 5, appears 3 times there (something no other wonder power does) and then appears AGAIN in world 6.

There's also a few times when a wonder flower activates and I just think "...this would have just been a basic level gimmick in an old game", but those are few and far between, and in general this whole focal point of the game is incredibly fun.

Like most Mario games going for 100% is almost essential for actually finding any meat in the game though. These levels feel super short when just running through them, more so than even normal. There were times when I missed a flower coin (replacement for star coins, but function the exact same) so I had to run through a level again and it took me less than a minute.

Lots of characters to play as, including mainstays like Mario, Luigi and Peach. Yellow Toad and Blue Toad return, but not regular Toad for whatever reason. Daisy is added as a playable character for the first time(?) in a mainline platformer. Then there's Yoshi (in 4 colours) and Nabbit, who act as easy mode since they can't use power ups, but don't take damage. Yoshi also has flutter jump and can swallow enemies (no eggs though) while Nabbit...actually I didn't play Nabbit to know what, if anything, his special ability was.

While I appreciate letting Yoshi act like Yoshi in exchange for not using power ups, despite no one else getting unique properties (like Luigi's higher jumping or Peach's floating), having this invincibility should have been a toggle for everyone. It makes no sense to lock certain characters behind what are basically difficulty modes.

Speaking of, badges are here to affect difficulty too! They can range from helpful like letting you float with your hat, or doing a double jump, to more mundane utility like being a coin magnet, to...actually making things harder for you? Like making you jump higher but you're ALWAYS jumping, or making you invisible. I can only assume the latter are for challenge runs. Especially being invisible. In fact there are badge stages specifically designed around what each badge can do, since obviously normal levels can't lock things with the assumption you're using a specific badge, and invisibility is literally just "Haha this platforming stuff is a lot harder when you can't see yourself".

Quick thoughts on the new power ups:
Elephant: Weird and doesn't really fit how Mario has used power-ups before, but pretty fun to use.
Bubble: Not a fan. Kind of bland.
Drill: Can be fun, provides nice protection from enemies above you, making it fairly unique, at least in this game.

There's no "easy-mode" power up like the Tanooki or Cape this time. I guess playing as Yoshi with his flutter jump and/or using certain badges does that.

I'm rambling without purpose now. The game is very fun and creative. Every level offers something new. It's just very short.

Nice game, but survives almost entirely on the vibe because gameplay is largely just walking from point A to point B and interacting with the next NPC. This is broken up by the occasional chase sequence or very simple puzzles, and then a few stealth sections towards the end.

It's nothing overly special, but it doesn't need to be since it's just a short game where you spend a few hours in a fairly interesting world, talking to not-so-fairly interesting characters (I mean they are all literally robots).

The last chapter is really powerful though.

A somewhat short game to tide people over between the original and Spider-Man 2, Miles Morales standalone adventure feels extremely similar, in both gameplay and story.

Some additions have been made to make the already varied combat of the original even better, and pre-emptively gives Miles a unique kit going into the next game.

There are many moments that really feel like you're watching/playing a big budget superhero film, most notably the bridge scene.

I have a few issues with the game, like too many missions being way too slow paced and essentially "walk and talk" cutscenes that act as gameplay. Ranged enemies seemed way too intrusive and made certain fighting tactics where you have to stand in one space for more than a second, like swinging objects around, impossible. Any puzzles in the game will basically be answered for you by Miles himself (there may be an option to turn that off to be fair, I never checked). They're all pretty minor problems, much like any were originally.

There's not a whole lot to say about the game that can't be said for the original. It's just kind of more of that with minor changes.

Cute game. I like the art style. The music is fairly catchy too, despite not being too memorable. But it's simple idea isn't enough to carry it through the whole thing. What makes it worse is how imprecise the whole mechanic the game is built around feels. You're constantly forced to make split second shots in mid-air, and all you can do it point in the right direction and hope it hits the target, rather than being one pixel too high, or just straight up grabbing on to something else by accident. It's a very frustrating experience in a bunch of game levels that feel very lifeless.

There's multiple types of collectables to get in a level. The problem I have with this whole mechanic is how it's very all or nothing. Getting 100% is nice, but if you're not going for it (and there's a good chance you won't since it'll mean replaying each level at least once just for the speed run collectable) then there's no reason to do the others. Just going through them:

-Grabbing every coin: Coins can be spent at a shop for either extra hats to wear, or artwork. You don't need to get the "every coin" collectable to buy things, but I guess the coins themselves at least have value, even if it is only aesthetic. The artwork reward is kinda dumb though since not only can you see most of the artwork just fine in the purchase menu, just with a "500 coins" plastered on it, but when you buy it and open it, it only fills about 40% of the screen. So do you really want to spend your time collecting coins to be able to see a small picture you can already see just fine on the menu itself?

-2 emeralds: Not really hidden at all, but generally slightly off the beaten path. No bonus to getting them at all by themselves.

-1 "skull" token: Found in hidden holes that lead to a short, harder platforming section. These could be fun to do just for the sake of the challenge, but the collectable itself doesn't do anything by itself.

-Notes: Each level contains a note providing a brief bit of...lore? Character depth? I dunno. Just random notes that are usually written by the Protagonists lost parents, or even random unseen characters or enemies. I guess they provide a benefit by themselves of just having something to read, but who really wanted to expand the premise of a game made to emulate the simple plot of old games where "save your parents" is literally the entire story?

-Speed run and no death: Obviously these are challenges by themselves that players may want to do, so it's just a reward for that I guess.

So yeah, if you're not going for 100% you have little reason to worry about any of these and can just go through the levels ignoring everything, making a simple game feel even more hollow.

That "little reason" though is the fact that you can occasionally find chests between levels. Many of them can be opened for free, but some require a certain amount of X collectables, or even X amount of perfected levels. These chests contain either an extra heart piece, or another hat. The heart pieces are obviously what you want, but it just feels like an ultimately lacklustre reward for the amount of effort to master so many levels in such a clunky game. Most of your deaths will come from bottomless pits anyway.

So this game that doesn't even feel good to play asks me to do so many things in a single level, and the only thing it can think to reward me with is more HP. Maybe if the game was fun I could accept that, but as it stands, nah. Better rewards could be things like faster speed, longer range, a bigger hitbox for the guns tongue. Anything that would feel rewarding and make you feel like you were getting progressively more powerful. Not something that exists pretty much just for making the final boss easier, and ironically allowing levels to be sped through even faster by being able to ignore most hazards that aren't optional.

The game tried to capture the magic of that PS1/N64 era, and the best thing it captured from there was when you liked a game in your childhood only to replay it as an adult and realise it aged horribly.