Undeniably sweet, charming and wholesome… even when you spend all of your time drawing dicks, scrawling obscenities, splatter-painting every surface with hideous globs of color, and generally creating a bunch of horrifying MS Paint monstrosities that everyone trips over themselves to praise and fawn over. I vandalized their entire village and they loved me for it.

Deducting one star because of the high number of gamebreaking bugs that continually stymied my progress and made me restart — ESPECIALLY a truly egregious bug that kept freezing up my game during the last boss fight. Totally inexcusable.

Like an old, ratty, moth-eaten security blanket from your childhood: cozy, comforting, and capable of mustering up a lot warm nostalgic fuzzies, but ultimately a little threadbare, leaving you feeling cold and a little bummed out. There’s a lot to like about this game—the pixel art, level design, and basic mechanics are all superlative—but the whole thing is hampered by the inert pacing, needless repetitions, dogshit writing, and some of the clumsiest storytelling I've ever seen in a video game (especially as it careens into a multi-car pileup of narrative convolution and interconnected "shared universe" building near the end). It doesn't help that the game's entire roster of characters are a bunch of bland ciphers, lacking the depth and dimensionality of even the thinnest planks of cardboard. I just... didn't care... about anything that happened... to them or to the world they inhabit.

Not terrible, sure... but hardly worth all the hoopla. In the grand scheme of things, I'd much rather just replay Lufia II.

And I am most certainly NOT going back for that True Ending.

Every day there's a new Mario level for me to play.
Some of them are great.
Some of them are janky as hell.
Some of them make me want to throw my Switch across the room.
Some of them give me literal goosebumps of joy.
This game is great!

A big, beautiful, bonanza-sized nostalgia wank that—much like something like Twin Peaks: The Return—doubles as a self-reflexive autocritique of the entire enterprise of indulging in said nostalgia, interrogating our desires and expectations for even wanting to re-experience this narrative in the first place. I, for one, loved the bold narrative leaps this game makes throughout its generous runtime (however wild and literal they might be at times), adored its surprisingly complex and satisfying combat (eat my ass, Arsenal!), and was all-in-all walloped by huge stretches of it. I could probably do without some of the bloat and tedious side missions, but this was still pretty terrific.