I really tried to like this game, especially since I heard this is one of the best along with The Thousand Year Door, but this game ended up being a massive disappointment for me. The two main things that bothered me were the combat and the backtracking. I'll start with the latter since I have less to say about it. This game has so much backtracking, it feels like instead of having more unique areas, they have smaller areas that take you back to a hub world. This is more apparent in certain parts of the game, such as Shy Guy's Toy Box, Lavalava Land, and Flower Fields. It felt like a lot of the time spent in this game was going back to a previous area and trying to figure out where to go next. For the combat, I'll start with enemies. Certain enemies are extremely annoying to fight and unfortunately it's a majority, especially the further you go in the game. The game starts off simple with hitting A at the right time to block and take less damage, but it starts adding enemies that require you to spam A while they drain your HP or use an attack where you need to block multiple times which feels clunky. This is a problem because the game never makes you feel like you have enough HP, FP, or BP despite the fact that I would fight almost every enemy I would encounter. I started having to avoid combat at times because I would be low HP very quickly especially early game. Even at the end when I had max HP and FP, combat would feel like a close call. The bosses in this game are a great example of this. Some of the bosses like Huff N' Puff and the Crystal King feel either not fun or not fair at times. For Bowser, it makes sense and he was the only boss in the second half of the game I actually liked. Status effects feel really unfair at times, since they either prevent you from using Mario or prevent you from using your partner, which slows down gameplay a lot especially in bosses like the Crystal King. It especially sucks that when Mario is hit by a status effect, he can't block meaning he needs to take every hit and has no opportunity to block. I found that the further the game went, the more annoyed I was getting at the combat, and I just can't stand it. If I have to say something good about the game, I at least liked the humour of the game, since it was a lot different than I expected, though the story is pretty generic and not that interesting for the most part. The soundtrack was kind of bad near the beginning but the further in the game the better it was getting so that part gets a mixed rating as well. Overall, I would say while this game isn't the absolute worst game I've played, it definitely is one of, if not the most disappointing in a while.