Sorry folks but it actually kind of rules. Clearly has a lot of love for the series behind every aspect of its design (porting over elements like boost/health management and the spin attack from later entries is great, the character art in the menus is cool) and the skyway is a genuinely well thought out comeback mechanic. Of course it's not a GX remaster or big budget new entry, but so called F Zero fans really seem to hate... the original F-Zero with X's mechanics. There is an element of luck that's going to come with a 99 person race, absolutely, but I'd say that the skill based racing and really tense risk/reward are here just as much as in prior series entries too. Really addictive arcade like experience that is unfortunately being beaten on by people for imo pretty superficial reasons.

Aesthetics on point and the movement was absolutely nailed here. I can see myself booting this back up near constantly whenever I have a half hour to kill just to vibe and freestyle around, so on those counts this is everything it needed to be and more. Also ended up very impressed with the level design for the most part, thought the sandboxes they made were fun to move around in and secrets were placed just as perfectly as they would be in a THPS. Only quibble I have on that front is that certain things are needlessly scarce, why are there so few spots per map to reset your heat or switch out your character, and why are they sometimes extremely out of the way. Character switching especially just does not seem like it should be so cumbersome.

Soundtrack is also a banger as well it should be, though I will say there are one or two really, really repetitive duds and the game sort of frontloads them, leaving a bad first impression.

I appreciate that the story here is much more ambitious than I would have expected, but I don't think it amounts to much in the end aside from one or two cool moments and some occasionally amusing dialogue. It honestly had me going for a second thinking it was about to get really interesting before sort of just... pivoting away from any sort of intrigue to instead have a pretty by the book ending.

Lastly, I think this could have benefited from some more polish, especially in the cutscene and sound design departments. Cutscenes often feel pretty limp with very little in the way of sound effects, shots seeming to hang for strangely long amounts of time, and the soundtrack which complements the gameplay so well often feels poorly implemented in these scenes as well.

I think what Team Reptile did here is one hell of a start though and really hope they continue with this series because now that they have all of this to expand off of I think a Bomb Rush 2 could be even better.

It's really cool that despite them all being so mechanically similar, all 4 Pikmin games feel so distinct from each other.

Pikmin 1 is the atmospheric one focused primarily on time management
Pikmin 2 is the kind of bullshit hard dungeon crawler
Pikmin 3 is the one that leans most heavily into the RTS elements
and Pikmin 4, finally, is the "adventure game," for better and worse!

I can see some hardcore Pikmin fans being somewhat disappointed with the direction this took, and even I kind of had moments of concern with the overlong tutorial and the inclusion of... rpg elements (that's right, welcome to modern AAA, Pikmin) but I gotta say for that being what it is, I ended up liking it quite a lot! It helps that this is definitely the most fully featured Pikmin yet, with lots of variety in the main campaign and basically an entire game after the credits (it's quite frankly weird that they put the credits where they did here). Integrating the mission mode and multiplayer directly into the campaign was a really smart move, breaks up the pace nicely and makes it much more likely that players actually engage with these elements, which have always been the unsung heroes of prior Pikmin games.

Another quick note - the Treasure catalog and Piklopedia entries (especially when more is unlocked for each entry postgame) are some of the best Nintendo writing of the Switch era, equal parts hilarious and at times touching. Wonderful stuff.

It's always exciting when a game comes out and you can feel the confidence of the team that made it through the game itself. Tears of the Kingdom is one of the most confident games I've ever played, and despite any minor misgivings I may have with certain elements, it earns that confidence. In the 6 years since BOTW open world devs have just barely started to catch up only to be absolutely humbled yet again by a game running on 2017 mobile hardware.

They doubled down on every single aspect of BOTW, even those that got fan backlash - and in just about all cases I'd say they absolutely made the right call. When I saw that not only was aggressive weapon durability back but it was actually given a story contextualization this time I had the biggest grin on my face.

Every single new ability Link gets in this is a total gamechanger and multiplicative. Ultrahand being so incredibly freeform has really led to a whole new era in Zelda traversal and puzzle solving that feels like yet another revolution. Having mechanics like this, normally reserved for games that revolve solely around building, actually implemented into the context of a narrative action/adventure game, and the game having to be designed around all that that implies, really left me feeling so satisfied every time I was presented with an obstacle. There is friction here - it's not as simple as just finding a one size fits all solution for every problem, and sometimes creations take time to come together, but I think that's seriously the magic of it. Of course these ideas you have can all go horribly wrong too - which leads me to my next point - this is one of the funniest games ever made. Not due to charming dialogue or quirky characters (though there is plently of that in Zelda fashion), just entirely through looney tunes gags that you invent yourself and wild situations you can end up in. The fact that they clearly clued in on this and leaned into it so heavily was a great decision.

I could go on and on - The multilayered world is genius in so many ways, the story is mostly interesting with some spectacular moments but definitely is not the series best, some dungeons are just average while others are actually pretty incredible and show the potential of dungeons in this new format - the point is, this is easily one of the most impressive games ever created and it makes 90% of AAA look absolutely dated and bereft of ideas by comparison.

Real solid, streamlined experience that complements the main game really well and adds all the lore/fanservice that fans were bitching about not being included in 3 even though that's really not the issue I had with that game's story. That fanservice really did work on me though - seeing this cast come together and send off this saga ended up being really rewarding, and I think it was smart of them to choose not to answer some questions.

A few knocks though - Glimmer and Nikol feel underdeveloped which is a real shame because the potential was there for some great moments with them. The game also feels extremely weirdly balanced, presumably because they had to account for the fact that they locked even the most basic functionality of the battle system behind optional items found while exploring, which is great for encouraging said exploration but also means they probably had to account for you rolling up to the final boss with a team of characters that had basically nothing in terms of gems or skills. Also is it just me or is the cutscene direction a pretty big step down from the base game? Slight disappointment there.

One final note: Good god, Monolith, hire some audio staff. Ever since Xenoblade 1 the audio mix, sound effects, default sound levels etc. have been majorly fucked in every single release and even tinkering with the settings on the user's end won't improve things much. Honestly my biggest wish for this company as they head onto the next generation of Nintendo hardware.

Seems a lot of the big reviews here for this one compare it favorably to Bayo 3 and as someone who liked Bayo 3 quite a bit I wouldn't say that. That said this is still a damn solid game in its own right. Presentation is really charming (the voice cast is incredible!) and I think they managed to pull off the Brothers, A Tale of Two Sons control scheme quite well. The puzzles and exploration are also well done but I did find exploring hampered by an extremely unhelpful map and a fast travel system with limitations that I swear were imposed mainly to pad out the game length which made this a real pain to go for 100% in. The combat I'm rather mixed on - I get the idea behind having Cereza focus exclusively on binding enemies to avoid too much mental overload controlling both characters at once, but often this just led to me circle strafing with her and holding ZL while Cheshire does all the real work. All in all this was still a very charming game and I hope to see more stuff like this come out of Platinum as despite liking Bayo 3 quite a bit you can tell that they are having some big scope creep issues in a lot of their larger, more "AAA" titles of late.