On one hand, they added some great characters, a handful of banger tracks, re-balanced characters and karts to finally kill WaluWiggler, and killed item bagging.
On the other hand, god most of these tracks are awful. Using giant red arrows to tell you where to go, block off paths, and instantly Lakitu you if you touch them is not a valid replacement for a solid track design. The city tracks have far too aggressive Lakitu in general beyond just the arrows. All of the city tracks are trash. Piranha Plant Cove is cool aesthetically but the arrows ruin it, the more I play it the less I like it. They add such a nothing track like Toad Circuit instead of any of the 3DS bangers still missing. SO many mid tracks while greats are MIA still.

Base game was decent. Haven't written a review for that yet but tl;dr: some good bits mixed with some bad bits and some jank with awkward story delivery. More fun than frustrating. This DLC though is just awful.

Tails and Knuckles challenges are far more obnoxious bullshit than anything from the base game. None of the other characters start with even a basic attack. Knuckles is some straight up Sonic 06 jank. Sometimes when gliding into a wall he just doesn't cling and goes into a free fall instead that you cannot act out of. When you are climbing, the designated red climbing walls only (which is super dumb, he could climb on anything in past games), if you touch anything other than the red surface it flings him a mile off the wall. His glide turning radius is so wide as to be useless at recovering from that "mistake," by the time you turn around you're below what you were trying to climb so back to the start. You get to Tails' section and have to deal with bullshit like "break open a crate only for there to be a boost pad inside that launches you off the platform and start over." Also the game cannot remember where your character last was when you upgrade abilities, despite the base game never having that problem, so it resets you to the nearest auto save point, wtf

The three of them are also still in glitchy ghost mode despite that being dumb and un-fun, and despite Sage saying she'd reverse them giving up their bodies, and despite the story previously making a point of them being unable to interact with the world like that.

And then you have to do towers as Sonic that conists of BS like cylooping around a thing surrounded by boost pads that'll launch you off, and no short cuts back up, followed by a boss rush that requires frame perfect parries to animations unsynched to the parry timing required, that force you to re-do tedious running sections when you fail one, and without a single ring replenishment.

Fuck this DLC, its not even hard in a fair and fun challenging way. I love a good challenge. It's just nothing but obnoxious bullshit that does not respect your time or your efforts. Oh yeah, and the draw distance and pop in is even worse than the base game too

The gameplay is like, a 2 star. It's nothing but walking back and forth for long periods of time, and math puzzles. The math puzzles range from "do very simple arithmetic" to "the answer is written in your guidebook, just copy that down" to "obtuse ways of counting your fingers you had to look up." My biggest gripe with the gameplay is that there is an in-game memo you can write notes down on with the touch screen, but you cannot have this memo up at the same time as anything you'd need it for. You cannot have it open at the same time as your side objective hints, your guide book, or while solving. Makes the memo useless and I used a notepad on my PC instead.

My score is boosted by everything else, the bopping OST, the atmosphere and mood, the humor, and one of the best stories I've seen on the 3DS (though several of the reveals and twists do hinge on you having played The Silver Case beforehand, this is a stealth sequel). The SIlver Case is not necessary for the core message of Flower, Sun, and Rain, but there are elements that might confuse you (more than usual) if you play this first.

Third entry in the Dusk series, probably my favorite overall. Crafting mechanics are just as addicting as Escha to Logy, with a new means to attach skills to items added on top. Combat did away with positioning around the enemy for benefits, but instead party skills have a lot more interesting mechanics to them with some unique time cards, buffs, and level manipulation. Music got upgraded, the best soundtrack of the three imo. I enjoyed the cast of characters and the overall plot of this one more than Escha, and it does a good job of tying in characters and story from the first two games without them overshadowing the story of the Shallies. The Dusk gets a lot more focus this time around, and because of that it still can't quite match the vibes that came from it being so out of focus in Ayesha, but it gets closer than Escha did and the exploration of it is still interesting. Shallie makes a return to the very imagined locales of Ayesha that I was missing in Escha as well. The ending still leaves room to explore this world more, but it does a good job tying up the stories and makes a nice conclusion to the trilogy

My second Atelier, coming immediately after finishing Ayesha. In some areas better than Ayesha, in other ways worse. The crafting system takes everything from Ayesha but cleans up the interface and adds some new mechanics and depth, and the result was making the crafting so much more addictive. Combat similarly takes what worked in Ayesha, changes the assist mechanics a little, and polishes into something a lot more addicting. Playing on normal difficulty however, it was also much easier for the majority of the game. Early game when you only have a couple party members and like, two bomb uses before you have to return to town, similar to Ayesha opening stuggle, but as soon as you get a full party of 6 the combat becomes absolutely trivial until pretty late in the game when there's a spike in difficulty to bring it up to something fun with strategy again, but not overly difficult. The story is a lot slower to pick up, but once it does its alright, though I like the story and characters of Ayesha and Shallie both more. Much more upbeat and optimistic tone than the other games despite the same setting of a dying world. Time limit still exists, but has been made into something almost impossible to fail, to the point it almost doesn't exist save to keep you from progressing the main story immediately. The titular Dusk, the dying world, comes a little bit more into focus than Ayesha, but its not the main focus still, but the detailed world map from Ayesha is gone and instead the geography of the land is much more vague unfortunately, and a lot of the locales feel more generic compared to Ayesha's. Still a really fun game, the stress of the time is gone leaning much more into the relaxing, comfy side.

My first Atelier game, and a really good, comfy time. Great music, great characters and a decently good story. Crafting mechanics got better in the sequels, but was still fun to learn in this one. Set on a backdrop of a slowly dying world that exists just out of focus, while the focus is on a more personal journey creates a vibe unmatched by even its sequels. That setting is also full of really imagined, creative locales. There's a time limit to the game which isn't communicated well to the player, and there's no way to know how well you are on track for it as you go, creating a little bit of stress in an otherwise relaxing game, but it was actually fairly lenient and I ended up with a lot of extra time left over. Combat is turn based by with enemies in the center and your party's positions around them mattering significantly. The two sequels were much easier over all, but Ayesha was able to provide a consistent level of difficulty throughout the experience, where enemies could pose a threat the entire time, and managing health, MP, and items was always important. Loved this game, found a new favorite series with this.

A nice adventure game. Could use more cat things, there's no real night vision, nothing using their scent, no cat fights, no tree climbing. Can only jump in context sensitive spots, but landing on narrow rails would be frustrating with a normal jump understandably. I liked the settings and meeting the robots and learning about what happened to the world, though the story isn't about the cat itself much, the cat serves as a vehicle for the drone in that regards. The PC version suffers from bad Unreal Engine shader cache issues that cause the game to drop to single digit fps for a couple whole seconds at a time when trying to do the speed run.