Slow start be damned, those writers went crazy on this game.

Having a top three story in Pokemon honestly isn’t saying much but the character cast is so charming and lovable that I couldn’t care less. Team Skull was amazing in both concept and execution, Lillie is a great driving force for the player, and the way the legendary is treated here gives me chills to this very day.

Hard to say anything about the gameplay, which is really just the standard Pokemon experience, but the Totem challenges are pretty cute, so that’s something, I guess. All in all, still a fun game in general.

Its hard to describe, but something about the vibes of this game just kinda speak to me. Part of the reason I like the games I like so much is because they tickle those same parts of my brain that SM did, not from a gameplay perspective necessarily, but from some weird sentimental metric that I can’t really find a name for. What I’m trying to say is that SM changed, or at least cemented, how I look at games as a whole, so I can at least thank it for that.

Lonely Lillie is a top 5 track in the entire franchise btw, You can’t change my mind.

This game is legitimately so perfect that it actually becomes a flaw since pretty much no part of this game is underwhelming (Aside from maybe the endings), making me feel exhausted by even just singular dungeons, let alone the whole game. It was a good kind of exhaustion though, one akin to that of going on a run around the block in the morning. I respect the “Everything and the kitchen sink” approach the devs took here, because Crosscode constantly impressed me every single hour I played it. Of course, we all know that this game is a 10/10 just for Lea’s existence alone, so why should I ramble on about the perfect combat, great story, beautiful pixel graphics and charming characters. Lea is the perfect representation of all of this game’s greatness. It’s incredible how they really dropped one of the greatest gaming protagonists of all time like it was nothing.

Table Girl is one of my favorite characters in fiction.

After 4 playthroughs of this game, including a 0% run, I couldn’t sugarcoat it anymore. This is a masterpiece. The story is definitely way more vague than it has any right to be, and its generally visually uninteresting, but the gameplay so damn fun. I thought I was done with the game after beating Hell mode but hours later I’d be back again because maybe I can get that one achievement now, or maybe I do have the skills and knowledge to do a Bunny Extinction run, or maybe getting 0% is more possible than I thought. This game had such a strong vice grip on me that I was not expecting.

The bosses, movement, power progression, difficulty curve, and nonlinearity are so well done that I was kinda left flabbergasted. After all, the look of this game doesn’t really scream “Metroidvania masterclass”, but I guess this world has lots of surprises for us. Another thing that surprised me was how I almost got hit on the emotional side in the dlc section of the game, but that’s mostly because the boss fight surrounding said moment is one of the peakest peaks to ever peak.