I absolutely love this game! Having just played through the whole Mario and Luigi franchise, I was expecting Paper Mario to just be more of that, but it actually has a significantly different feel.

Paper Mario is extremely genuine, and that has left a deep impression on me. The simple and stout character designs, thick outlines, simple yet moving story, and merry music all contribute to a very prominent feeling of innocent whimsy. Even though I do not have any nostalgia for this game, playing it felt similar to playing some of the coziest games from my childhood.

Despite my general distaste for turn based RPGs, I am a big fan of Paper Mario's turn based combat with timed action commands. It keeps me consistently attentive and entertained in combats where I would be bored without the action commands. I do wish that the action commands were more varied though, as between Mario and his 8 party members, almost all of your actions use one of the same 6 input commands. I was pretty tired of mashing A and repeatedly flicking the stick left by the end of the game.

Exploring the world of Paper Mario was very fun. The environments are very cute and aesthetically pleasing and the world feels very rich! I am very impressed by how much effort was put into minor features, such as the number of side quests for you to complete and the astounding amount of dialogue written for Goombario when you ask him about almost any NPC or environment. This combined with the interconnectedness of the entire map made the world feel very whole.

The difficulty of this game is very elastic, as you are given the freedom to choose where almost all of your level-up stat buffs should be assigned. I chose to put all of my stats into Badge Points, and then into Flower Points after capping out my BP. This made the game MUCH more difficult since my maximum health remained extremely low for the whole playthrough. If I were upgrading stats with the purpose of maximizing effectiveness I do think that the game would have ended up being pretty trivial. It would be a bummer if you did that on a first playthrough expecting the game to be more challenging, but at least for repeat playthroughs, the level-up mechanics are very appreciated for allowing difficulty customization.

Paper Mario was a treat to play, with its childlike aesthetic, engaging combat, and captivatingly innocent world. I'm looking forward to playing The Thousand Year Door in the near future after this wonderful experience.

This sequel alters the gameplay of its predecessor by allowing you to control the witch and the hero simultaneously with the circle pad and face buttons. This dramatically increases the skill ceiling, which was extremely low in the first game. Thanks to this heightened skill ceiling, as well as the absence of the colossal difficulty spikes from the first game, grinding isn’t really required anymore. On paper these are good changes, but I found myself not enjoying this game as much as the first because the controls felt a little awkward and the increased complexity downplays the simplicity of the gameplay, which is what I found to be the strongest aspect of the first game. Playing this definitely wasn’t a bad time, and the game is very short so it doesn’t overstay its welcome. It might be worth checking out if you like the original.

While I can recognize I have some nostalgia for this game, I do think it is genuinely charming. The gameplay and graphics are hyper-simple, but I think that has its own charm. There are some mandatory grinding sessions you will need to make, but the levels are so short that replaying or reattempting a small handful of levels didn't feel like a waste of time. The fact that you will end up underpowered at multiple points does also have the upside that you are guaranteed to be feeling the pressure from being surrounded by a swarm of enemies during your time in this game, which made for very exciting clutch moments when I was just barely able to get through a level with a sliver of health left on the witch. Cute, fun, and simple game overall, maybe check it out if you're in the mood for something simple.

Emerald Double is a pretty cool ROM hack, adding many more species and events to Hoenn, as well as many appreciated mechanical updates (reusable TMs, phys/spec split, fairy type, etc). I am rather impressed by the mostly consistent balance Emerald Double provides, with custom trainers sporting strong pokemon at higher levels, keeping me on my toes without being so strong to leave me feeling impotent. Overworld changes in this hack are minor but very thoughtful, such as the inclusion of important TMs like weather, protect, and toxic in early PokeMarts, which made for a significantly more fun teambuilding experience.

While I did enjoy my time with Emerald Double, a few unfortunate bugs in the game disrupt what I see as the main appeal of a Pokemon game with such a heavy emphasis on battling. The biggest bummer is that the trainer AI just doesn't work correctly. Many times throughout my playthrough there were situations where opponent trainers would make moves that the AI should never make. Things like using a move that has no effect on the target or targeting the wrong pokemon on my side of the field. Even gym leaders made these sorts of blunders! Not being able to anticipate what move the opponent will make completely undermines the value of switching and using protect, some of the most satisfying parts of double battles. This led to me feeling cheesed in situations when protecting with a 'mon who should have been double targeted by the opponent, but the trainer inexplicably chose to use resisted attacks into my partner instead.

While I did praise the game for a well balanced difficulty level throughout most of the game, the elite 4 were a pretty massive level jump that required a serious revision to my team. Because I had to keep an HM slave in my party for the three water HMs of the game and due to high level opponents requiring some thrifty exp management, I only had 5 actual party members after getting out of victory road. After a few attempts of the elite 4 I realized it was unrealistic to win with my current setup and I eventually decided to catch Lugia and grind a couple levels to makeup the difference. This final stretch of the game felt a little too hard in my opinion. My team was Swampert, Weezing, Flygon, Flareon, Celebi, and Lugia; while my team definitely could have been improved in ways other than including Lugia (Flareon was clearly a weak link), I felt like my team was still pretty well built with diverse typings, earthquake synergy, and a fire/water/grass core. I can only imagine the rude awakening you'd be in for if you tried to beat this game with some less optimal pokemon.

I wouldn't really recommend Emerald Double due to the previously mentioned trainer AI bugs. If it weren't for that unfortunate problem I could see myself playing this ROM hack multiple times. If that doesn't sound like it would bother you and you want to play a doubles focused pokemon game other than Colosseum/XD, then you'd probably enjoy this game.

I am excited to write about Super Paper Mario after my lengthy 100% save file. I started this most recent save file on a whim, and quickly learned that I have intensely nostalgic feelings for this game. This was one of the first games I got for the Wii as a child, and upon booting the game I was amused to see that my original save file had 76 hours logged. For reference, this game can easily be beaten in less than 20 hours and my 100% playthrough took only 36 hours. I am very aware that my perception of this game is warped by my nostalgia for it, so keep that in mind for this review.

Something you will notice right away with this game is its geometric artstyle. It is nothing like anything seen in any other Mario game, with most characters and locations being made of a collection of simple shapes and geometry. I think it looks alright, it’s cute if maybe a little underwhelming. But when playing this game as an adult I realized that this artistic style was chosen to align the visuals of the game with imagery from computers of the early 2000s. As a child I only noticed the mouse cursor that selects Mario when he goes 3D, but this motif is much more ubiquitous than just that. The characters and environments are so simple and geometric because they are meant to look like things you could draw in MS Paint. I also think that Tippi is a pretty clear reference to the MSN butterfly, the Cragnons from chapter 5 look just like the Apple “Finder” icon, and Mario’s 3D countdown bar looks just like the color bar from old MS Paint. My theories as to the meaning behind this direction are that either this game is set in a computer to show a progression of storytelling mediums like its predecessors did (PM64 is told through a storybook, PMTTYD is told through a play, and SPM is told through digital media), or that the developers chose to represent the story through the lens of a computer to show their love of the technology of the time and to tie in the visual theming of the game to the narrative’s theme of love.

Super Paper Mario is known as the Mario game with a story, and people are not kidding when they say that. Playing it as an adult, the narrative of this game was the best part about it. It starts off strong, with an en media res cutscene on the title screen that introduces the game’s main antagonist, Count Bleck, as well as the staple Mario characters Peach, Bowser, and Luigi. It also puts the games primary theme of love in clear view, with the antagonist’s evil macguffin, the Chaos Heart, being made through a corrupted expression of love created by the non consensual marriage of Peach and Bowser. The purpose of this scene makes a lot more sense after actually starting a save file and getting through a bit of exposition, but the title screen cutscene is a nice way of immediately hooking the player before they have to sit through any exposition. None of SPM’s narrative elements on their own are outstanding, but when combined with the whole package of the music, characters, writing, and colorful visuals I think that this game is something special. The game even got me a bit emotional a couple times. SPM’s theme of love is loosely followed throughout the rest of the game, with chapters 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8 clearly connecting the narrative climax of the chapter to loving others or loving the world itself. Not to mention that the Pure Hearts you collect from each chapter are said to be literally made of love.

Something I never noticed about the early parts of the game, as a child, was Tippi’s negative attitude. From the moment you meet her at the end of the first cutscene, she seems disinterested in everything going on. She becomes a reluctant guide for you once you reach the main hub, at the request of Merlon. But at the end of chapter 3, Tippi starts becoming much more invested in the world and her relationship to others. This change gets spelled out for the player a bit later, but her tone shift from that point on is very noticeable on its own if you are engaging with her dialogue. Knowing the full context of her character, I think her initial attitude is a clever way of connecting Tippi to Count Bleck, both of whom have essentially lost interest in the world around them after they were separated due to the unfair denial of their love. Playing this game with a level of reading comprehension above that of a second grader has made me a lot more invested in the world of SPM (shocking, I know). There is a lot of lore in this game. Some of the pixls let loose juicy lore nuggets about the pixl uprising 1,500 years ago, there are murals in the pit of 100 trials describing where the ancients entrusted the Pure Hearts, each of the Pure Hearts has a story about how it came to rest where it is found, and there are many details about supporting characters’ histories that can be learned. I have yet to interface with any of the other Paper Mario games on as deep a level as this one, but I would be surprised if any of the other games contain as much worldbuilding as SPM.

The largest source of lore is the pair of bartenders who can be found in Flipside and Flopside. They will tell you a short story about the world, at the cost of 10 coins. I am befuddled as to why this service costs coins, as they don't provide you with any mechanical benefits. The primary purpose of the tales is to enrich the world, and they succeed at that! But I don't understand why this coin barrier was put in place to detract from a player’s ability to engage with this part of the game. The cost eventually adds up, as there are 34 stories to hear, totaling to 340 coins. Unfortunately, this is far from the only example of SPM discouraging players from engaging in its supplementary content.

The three major forms of side content in SPM, being maps, recipes, and cards, are all implemented extremely poorly and have negative synergy with the game’s other mechanics due to the exorbitant coin cost for all of them. You will need to grind coins in order to fully engage with these supplementary mechanics. The best way to grind coins in SPM is by using Catch Card SPs to catch Amayzee Daisies, and then selling their card at a 200 coin profit. You will need to do this around two dozen times for enough coins to fund everything. This method is extremely easy and doesn't take very long, maybe slightly above a minute per card, but I am so perplexed as to why the game was designed in a way that requires grinding several thousand coins. Grinding coins this way is already a chore, but if someone didn’t know about this method and instead did something like grinding coins by killing enemies– that would water down the overall quality of the game by ballooning the playtime spent on this extra stuff, even more than it already does. Roughly half of my playtime was spent engaging with this bonus content and I was already wishing it took at least a few less hours to complete by the end of it.

To finally get to this bonus content, Maps are the simplest, and probably the best designed, of these activities; you buy a map with coins and then go to the location shown on the map to find hidden treasure. Very often you will be rewarded for completing a map with a rare card, but other times it will be something with little value, such as cooking ingredients that are much more easily found in other places, or a sellable item that doesn't make a very good return when factoring in the cost you had to pay to buy the map in the first place. I like the maps because seeing the environments and music is one of the best parts of this game and, after beating the game, most NPCs will have new dialogue to see, so maps are a good extrinsic motivator to give all the towns a second visit.

Cards are my least favorite of these mechanics, as collecting them is mostly braindead busywork. As mentioned earlier, catching Amayzee Daisies with cards is the best way to make money, but other enemy cards essentially are never worth collecting, other than for completion’s sake. Owning a card for an enemy also gives a passive damage multiplier against the enemy on the card, but this is really not necessary at all. Without any card boosts, enemies will rarely take more than 2 hits to kill and pose no real threat to the player when you can just walk around an enemy in 3D if they are problematic. Rather than catching every enemy manually, it is much more efficient to buy random cards from a vendor in Flipside. I am glad that you don't need to catch all 256 enemies manually, but this method does not bring joy to my heart. The vast majority of your cards will be collected by buying random cards, one at a time, for 10 coins each. Even if you got all of the cards first try (which you won’t since you can pull repeats), that would be more than a 2,000 coin investment and several hundred button inputs to repeatedly go through the card purchase dialogue hundreds of times (my hand eventually got sore from spamming the 2 button)! The cards aren't even cool! They don't feature original art and their text is usually a much less interesting and shorter description of the tattle text that Tippi would tell you if you asked her for info about the actual character. This feature is honestly really bad and the game would be better without cards full stop.

Recipes are the last massive piece of side content that is displayed on the menu, and I can at least say that it is the most fleshed out of the three. There are two chefs (one in Flipside and one in Flopside) who can cook ingredients you give them to make dishes. This feature is MUCH more expansive than it deserves to be, featuring almost 100 unique recipes for different dishes. You can try to guess some recipes by providing the chefs with items you think will work, but to figure out all the recipes you will realistically need to find all of the cooking discs that are scattered around the world, each of which has about a dozen recipes on it. Unfortunately, there are multiple major flaws that ruin the cooking mechanic. Most importantly, essentially none of the dishes you can make are worth the effort. The majority of single item dishes are something like converting a 7hp healing item into a 12hp healing item, and the majority of dishes made by combining items have an effect like combining two 10hp healing items to get a 15hp or 20hp healing item. These dishes are less effective than simply using two items, it requires you to bring the items to the chefs and watch the unskippable cooking cutscene, and it requires you to either already have the cooking disc that tells you those items can be cooked or to risk losing the items by having a chef cook an unconfirmed recipe. That is a lot of reasons to not engage with the cooking service, and when comparing it to simply buying a Super Shroom Shake in Flipside which heals 20hp right out of the gate, it's a no brainer. And if you do want to make an individual item more effective by cooking it, there is no reason to deviate from the simplest recipes that you already know work (such as cooking a Super Shroom Shake or an Ultra Shroom Shake), leaving the other ~90 recipes out to dry. Despite their uselessness, I was still able to find enjoyment in simply making new recipes purely to add them to my recipe log. However, the worst part of the cooking process that made me kind of regret even going for 100% was the terrible layout of Flipside and Flopside. Say you want to cook a Blue Honey Shroom (Super Shroom Shake + Honey); you'll need to get the ingredients, and fortunately both of these items can be bought in the hub. If you start from Flipside F2, you would need to go to the Itty Bits shop on Flipside B1 to buy the Honey, then back to Flipside F2 so that you could go to Flopside. There you can get a Super Shroom Shake from the Flopside shop and then go to the chef on Flopside F1 and cook the two items together. So the full path would be FlipF2 > FlipF1 > FlipB1 > FlipF1 > FlipF2 > FlopF2 > FlopF1. Each loading zone has a cutscene in between, making for a very long path, especially when considering that these are the most accessible shops in the game! To make this feature less annoying, I think all the hub chefs and ingredient shops should have been consolidated between Flipside F2 and Flopside F2 to cut down on travel time. The excessive travel time is exacerbated both by Mario’s small inventory size of 10 items and the fact that the shops in Flipside B1 and Flopside B1 don't allow you to put items into your storage from there. Time spent getting ingredients gets even longer when a recipe requires items that can only be found outside the hub, and don't get me started on when a recipe requires you to cook part of the recipe with one chef and the rest of the recipe at the other. I get that the game doesn't want to break immersion by putting all of the parts of town that are of interest to the player right next to one another, but this is just brutal and honestly kills the feature. If they really wanted to keep the stores where they are, allowing the chefs to at least access ingredients from your storage would have helped a lot. Making cooked items significantly more potent would have also helped with making them more valuable. I am certain that at least two hours of my playtime was spent monotonously walking to and from shops in the hub while cooking new recipes.

The remaining optional content in the game isn’t much better than what I've already described. There are two pits of 100 trials in this game, and you have to clear the second one twice! I thought it was alright for the first ~200 rooms but it got a bit grating after that. Chapter 6 is also completely different after you beat the game, but that postgame chapter is literally just fighting 100 variants of the same enemy which is even more samey than doing the pit 3 times. Even though I think that the side content in this game is kinda just shameless padding, don't let that discourage you from playing SPM! I willingly chose to engage with all that this game has to offer, all of the side content is very much optional and there is no relevant downside to choosing to sidestep all of it entirely.

As I briefly mentioned, I think that the characters, music, writing and visuals of SPM combine to elevate the game a lot. The actual gameplay though– it's mid. Puzzles are common in this game, and they almost always have the most boring solution imaginable. The majority of the puzzles in this game will be finding a locked door and then walking past it along a linear path, which has a key at the end of it. Then backtrack to the locked door to advance. It’s inoffensive, if uncreative. Switching from a 2D to a 3D perspective is a major part of this game, and while I think the gimmick is cool, it is utilized poorly in several places. It certainly does enable some creative new puzzle scenarios, but sometimes there is also just something hidden in 3D without any clue that you need to flip there to find it, and flipping to 3D in every single room to look for secrets is just tedious and not worth the time it takes to check (the cooking disc randomly inside of one of the many houses in the hub is a perfect example of this). The characters control fine, but there is never any serious platforming or combat that requires the player to express any skill. I was shocked to find that none of the bosses in this game pose any threat (aside from the optional superboss at the end of the Flopside pit). Almost all of the bosses can be killed in a matter of seconds without the need for items by just attacking nonstop with no regard for incoming damage. The gameplay really is just a vehicle for the story, music, and visuals, and while I think that it performs that purpose well, I am sad that the gameplay wasn't given the attention necessary to be good on its own and allow it to combine with the game’s other aspects to make an even greater product.

Even though I wouldn’t recommend anyone to 100% this game, engaging with every aspect of this game brought me to appreciate it in ways that I wouldn't have otherwise and I am looking forward to playing through the campaign another time in the eventual future. This game is obviously very different from the two games that preceded it, and likely more flawed, but I think it is certainly far from what ruined the Paper Mario series, as some people think. This perspective may be clouded by nostalgia, but I think anyone who enjoys narratives in games and also anyone new to video games would appreciate the endearing story and charming atmosphere of Super Paper Mario.

Finally, I've finished replaying all the original games in the Mario and Luigi series since becoming an adult. I remember not being a fan of this game when I played it as a child, and this game definitely does have some significant flaws, but I was very surprised by how fun a lot of the gameplay was!

To start off with the positives, Paper Jam has the best combat in the whole Mario and Luigi series! This is what kept me motivated to continue playing the game, despite its low points. There are frequent boss fights all throughout the game, which were a BLAST to play. The main reason why the boss fights in this game are so good is because they have more creative and diverse attacks and counter opportunities. One of my favorite examples of this is the paper airplane attack that the Bowser Juniors' have. In this attack, you are basically playing chicken against Paper Bowser Jr. to see who can let their paper airplane get closest to the ground without landing. This attack is extremely unique, fun to play, and doesn't overstay its welcome. Several boss attacks in Paper Jam are also challenging to consistently counterattack, which I really liked! A common problem I had with the older games (especially Partners in Time) was that figuring out how to consistently counter all of a boss' attacks was too simple, and the fights would quickly become dull as you slowly chip away at the very large HP pool of the boss, with almost no risk of taking damage; at that point you already know that you've won but you just have to sit through the rest of the fight repeating the same action commands until the boss runs out of HP. Paper Jam keeps things exciting by including more counterattack options than just jumping and hammering and opting to make bosses more difficult by making countering tighter and more complex, rather than simply increasing the amount of health that each boss has.

The flashiest innovation that Paper Jam includes is the addition of Battle Cards. Serving as the replacement for Badges from Bowser's Inside Story and Dream Team, Battle Cards are abilities that you can activate, without consuming your turn in battle, at the cost of Star Points which you earn for performing successful attacks. The fun thing about Battle Cards is that you draw one each turn out of your custom deck of 10 cards! This inclusion of deckbuilding mechanics did a lot to make Paper Jam feel mechanically very different from all of the other Mario and Luigi games. Improving my deck by buying new cards from the shop and getting holographic cards drops from enemies added moments of excitement to the game that I am very appreciative of. I am pleasantly surprised by how well Battle Cards fit into the already established formula of a Mario and Luigi game, and I am sad that we didn't get the opportunity to see this concept iterated upon further in a future Mario and Luigi game!

The last big shakeup in this game is the addition of a third party member, Paper Mario. Other games in the Mario and Luigi series have added additional party members before, but Partners in Time did a very poor job executing this concept, as you can effectively only have 2 party members active at one time and the babies are entirely redunant characters anyways, and while Bowser's Inside Story did literally have three party members, the majority of that game was spent exploring the world as two separate parties (Mario and Luigi as one party and Bowser on his own). Paper Jam makes the simple change of adding Paper Mario to the Mario brothers' team, and this addition subtly makes the Mario and Luigi gameplay so much better. A problem shared among every Mario and Luigi game is that counterattacks are often easily cheesable. You are encouraged to counter enemies by closely looking at their behavior immediately before they attack to determine what bro they are targeting and then press the appropriate button (A for Mario, B for Luigi) to help the corresponding character avoid danger. But what is much easier to do is to simply press A and B at the same time so that regardless of who an enemy is attacking, you can preform the appropriate dodge without even needing to engage with the enemy's specific telegraphs. The addition of a third concurrent party member greatly alleviates this problem thanks to simple fact that it is very difficult to press A, B, and Y simultaneously. The specific implementation of Paper Mario goes even further to solve this issue, by also making him stand a significant distance behind Mario and Luigi. The reason why this is relevant, is because Paper Mario's distance from the enemies makes their attacks take longer to reach him, making his timing for many counterattacks offset from those for Mario and Luigi. This effectively makes it impossible to cover multiple bases at once by trying to counterattack with Paper Mario and another character at the same time. I consider the cheesability of the other games in the series to be a significant design flaw, and it is very nice to see that problem finally addressed in this game.

While Paper Jam made some incredible improvements to the standard Mario and Luigi experience, it does introduce some serious flaws as well. My biggest issue with the game is that there is a large amount of mandatory gameplay that just isn't fun. In the early game especially, there are many required quests you must complete to advance the story that are a completely different style of gameplay from the standard turn based battles and overworld exploration. The worst offenders, in my opinion, are the quests that make you play hide and seek to find hidden Paper Toads and the quests that make you chase and tackle Paper Toads in the overworld. There are many other types of quests in this game, many of which I actually did enjoy playing--like the quiz and Yoshi racing ones, but strangely most of the fun quests were optional.

The biggest waste of time though, is without a doubt, the papercraft battles. This is an evolution of the giant battles from Bowser's Inside Story and Dream Team, but instead of participating in cinematic turn based battles, you destroy other papercrafts in a 3D free-moment environment. These sections suck for multiple reasons. For one, the controls are very awkward and feel pretty terrible. You use tank controls, movement is pretty slow, there isn't much to actually interact with in any of these sections, and the combat is absolutely horrific. You are meant to bait attacks from enemies and then counterattack them after they miss. This already isn't great, since moving around your papercraft doesn't feel good, but it gets even worse because the enemies sometimes take a long time to get aggressive and try to attack. This leaves A LOT of awkward pauses in between each attack and counterattack combo. This gameplay loop made me very impatient, leading me to another major source of frustration: the lack of expression. The jump attack you use to destroy the enemies has a significant amount of windup, making it implausible to attack enemies before they make themselves vulnerable with a miss. It ended up not being worth the effort and time to try and play offensively due to the extremely railroaded design of this gameplay. There is also a stamina system in papercraft battles, which serves no purpose other than to be annoying. Stamina does not refill automatically and you must go to recharge stations to refill. This ends up being a total time waster because it takes several seconds to recharge and there is absolutely no risk while recharging, as enemies will not follow you to recharge stations. I honestly have no idea how this mode ended up in such a sorry state, the game would have been much much better without the inclusion of papercraft battles.

Something missing form Paper Jam is the imagination and humor that was present in the previous titles. This game is not creative. All of the enemies here are bog standard. There are no weird NPC races like the bean folk or the block people, there are no new enemy concepts like the cavity pokies or the shroobs, the theming of this game is extremely sterile. The most creative part of this game's theming is the addition of the Sticker Star rendition of Paper Mario, and if you know anything about Sticker Star you should know that paints a grim picture. The areas are also just as bland, sporting the all too common plains, desert, forest, ice, beach, and lava themes that the Mario fanbase has long since grown tired of. The world is also really small in this game, you get to the opposite end of the map very early on and you backtrack to every area of the game 1-2 times over the course of the game. One of the biggest falls from grace that this series has suffered in this game is the quality of the writing. Nothing interesting happens in this plot; Bowser kidnaps Peach and you rescue her. The paper characters were written in a way that I think is extremely boring, where they are essentially identical to their real counterparts in all ways other than being flat. And so little is said in so many words that I wouldn't blame you if you mashed A through the dialogue altogether. The humor that was present in the other games is mostly gone now, and many of the games attempts at being funny felt extremely dry, low effort, and fell completely flat for me. I can see these downgrades ruining the game for fans of the previous games, which is such a shame since the battling has never been better.

My remaining nitpicks and praises:
- The inclusion of a speed up button for cutscenes is nice, as the default speed is painfully slow. Its inclusion leave me wondering why they didn't just speed up the cutscenes though. Holding down R to speed up gets annoying too.
- The Koopalings have never been better than in this game. They actually feel like they have personalities here and are one of the only examples of the game doing something interesting with its characters.
- There are a lot of reused assets from Dream Team and Sticker Star to the point I found it distracting. This, the lack of polish in the secondary objectives, and the excessive backtracking leaves me thinking this game was rushed.
- I just dislike how Paper Mario looks in this game standing next to Mario and Luigi. He also doesn't really feel like Paper Mario. His major difference from Mario and Luigi is that he has a flutter jump, which isn't something he has in his home games leaving his inclusion feeling a little arbitrary.
- Paper Mario uses his thumbs up animation way too much, it got distracting.
- The optional boss rematches were very fun! I would like the mode better if you were auto leveled to the max level so that the experience could be more balanced, but it was still very fun additional content and beating the secret boss at the end of the boss rush was very exciting.
- All the tutorials are skippable! You can view them from the menu at anytime later too. Very nice feature.

Overall, I do like this game a lot and I plan on playing it again sometime, but it is such a shame that the overworld, writing, and many of the mandatory missions hamper the experience to such a significant degree. If you like the battling of Mario and Luigi or Paper Mario I'd say that this game is definitely worth your time, despite its many problems. Hopefully one day this series can get revived, because the formula it uses is really fun.

I'll get straight to the point and say that Pizza Tower fucks and is one of my favorite games of all time. It is an exhilarating and extremely rewarding experience chasing the P rank on every level. A P rank is awarded for clearing a level near flawlessly, with a combo active the entire level, and getting them is, without a doubt, the best part of the game. Levels are laid out such that you can gracefully, and extremely efficiently, flow through them as you grab each collectibles while continually refreshing your combo meter. This makes the moment to moment gameplay extremely rewarding in itself, once you understand Peppino's moveset and are able to soar through the obstacles laid out by the level at mach-speed! Racking up your combo while pulling off efficient movement tricks makes me feel cool as hell and is what drove me to devour this game.

The level design is far from the only thing that Pizza Tower knocks out of the park; the music, visuals, and aforementioned controls were all clearly given a lot of time to cook, giving the game an extremely unique identity and cumulating in the game's extremely sicknasty style. The hyper stylized MSPaint aesthetic was very offputting to me at first, but the brazen individuality of it quickly grew on me, and the game often takes advantage of it with surprisingly charming artwork that evokes the emotion of high quality MSPaint shitposts (such as the Baja Blast heist to name an example), which I am a major fan of. The music is just as strange as the visuals, with an extremely unique sound and random samples thrown in every so often. Despite that, I think that the music is still generally appealing in a way that non-terminally online people would be able to appreciate (although I am often told I have a terrible taste in music so I may be way off on this).

And finally, to get to Peppino's moveset, once you get a grasp on it, it's amazing. His run speed quickly builds to extreme heights, making long stretches of perfect play super rewarding as you reach record speeds. Fortunately, the camera is way zoomed out the whole game, so there is no issue with not being able to see things that are ahead of you that other speedy platformers like Sonic have. His wall climb also maintains his running speed, allowing you to continue building it up through large sections of each level. Turning around also conserves some of your speed, but it unfortunately has a pretty low cap on how much speed you can retain from it, which I would have liked to see increased or removed all together. The upward dash also stalls for no reason when you do a horizontal dash out of it, which is unsatisfying to lose seconds to. Peppino also has some secret tech that is never explained to the player which I am pretty baffled by. You can build instant speed from 0 with a crouch dash, cancel a dash by dashing in the opposite direction, and ground pound out of a dive by pressing down + jump midair. These moves are really useful, especially the ground pound, and I think I would have enjoyed the game less if I hadn't been informed of their existence by a friend. The second playable character, The Noise, also has some pretty great controls. He is more similar to Peppino than not, but his minor changes end up making him feel very different. Although, there are times where levels were clearly not designed with the abilities of The Noise in mind, making for strangely difficult obstacles and less satisfying sequences. Despite the minor imperfections, Pizza Tower's controls are a huge enabler for the frantic gameplay and rewarding level design that I love so much about it.

I do think that PT has a couple of major flaws that make it hard to get into. First, the best part of the game (getting P ranks) is not at all obvious to the player. Beyond existing and adding to the save files % score on the file select, there is no extrinsic incentive for players to try and get P ranks. In my initial playthrough, I didn't worry about getting S or P ranks at all and ended up being pretty underwhelmed by the game after I had beaten all the levels. Only after deciding to go back and try getting a few P ranks did I realize that that is the main appeal of the gameplay. I think this issue is exacerbated by my second major complaint, being the hidden collectibles. Every level has 9 major collectibles, multiple of which are hidden, often in hard to find places, especially if you are going fast (which is the best part of the game). This leaves the player in a really awkward spot, having to choose between taking their time to explore the level looking for secrets, and going fast to maintain their combo exercise mastery of the game's controls. This conflict is even more apparent when the secrets are hidden in parts of the level that are only accessible during the timed escape sequence at the end of each level. After I decided to get all the P ranks in this game, I just looked up a guide of all the collectible locations and had a much better time with the game after that, which I think speaks volumes as to how the secrets interfere with the game's biggest strength.

Pizza Tower makes me feel cool as fuck when I am showcasing my understanding of the game's controls and mechanics by earning P ranks. It is unforgettable, with its extremely unique music and art, not to mention the final boss, which is one of the most hype levels in any video game I've ever played. It occasionally gets in its own way by slowing the player down, and getting P ranks does admittedly ask for a lot of effort from the player, since they will have to play through the level at least one time before even attempting P rank just to get familiar with the route they'll have to take. These are relatively easy flaws to ignore though, and everything else is so well done that Pizza Tower has earned its place as one of my favorite games of all time!

This is the only idle game I have ever played, so all of the mechanics here were completely new to me and I am not sure how many of them were pioneered by Orteil nor how many of them are unique to this game, so I'm not sure how this game would feel to play as an idle game connoisseur. Regardless, as an idle game novice, the cocktail of mechanics that Cookie Clicker has to offer all come together to make an experience that is at times intriguing, boring, exhilarating, analytical, monotonous, and more.

I assume most people are familiar with the general premise of the game: you get cookies by clicking on a big cookie, spend cookies to buy things to click the cookie for you, and use your increased cookie income to buy things that click the cookie faster, and so on and so forth. Before I started playing this game 2 years ago, I wasn't aware of the many other mechanics that are present in Cookie Clicker which are the actually compelling parts of the game. There are abilities that the player can actively use to generate cookies that are much more interesting than simply buying more towers to generate cookies faster. Golden cookies are an obvious example of this, they will briefly appear every few minutes, and if you notice and click them, they will activate one of a few effects that will significantly increase your cookie production. However, golden cookies are far from the only example of secondary means to generate cookies, and I would even say they are the least interesting one. There are self described "minigames" in Cookie Clicker that allow you to manage unique resources to affect your cookie production in many unique ways. My favorite of them is the farming minigame, which allows you to grow crops that can change the properties of many other mechanics, until the associated crops expire. What makes this minigame so cool is that it synergizes with all of the game's other mechanics. There are crops to increase cookie production, decrease shop prices, make golden cookies appear more often, increase the potency of other crops, etc. The farm gives the player lots of room to think of creative ways to achieve many cookie related goals, and a big part of the fun I had playing this game was finding the best minigame strategies to maximize my cookies. This becomes exhilarating after you learn how to effectively synergize multiple of these mechanics simultaneously, leading to explosive amounts of cookies being produced at exponentially faster rates than is otherwise possible.

While I think that minigames are the most interesting mechanics in Cookie Clicker, the most powerful ability would have to be its legacy mechanics. Cookie Clicker is a legacy game, meaning that you will repeatedly start 'new' save files that are altered by the previous ones. How that manifests here is through ascensions, which cause you to lose all of your resources (towers, cookies, and upgrades) from that run in exchange for permanent upgrades on all future runs. There is an ascension skill tree that holds many powerful and unique upgrades, many of which are absurdly expensive the first time you reach the shop. But the permanent upgrades that you unlock each ascension will quickly allow you to bridge the gap between your available resources and the cost of each new milestone upgrade. This is one of the greatest joys to be found in the game: reaching levels of income and resources that previously seemed ludicrously unattainable. The first time I ascended to a new legacy was one of the incredibly exciting peaks that Cookie Clicker has to offer for those who allow themselves to become invested in their cookie production speed. My cookie production potential increased by multiple orders of magnitude and my new run was flying past milestones that took me days in the previous legacy, in only a matter of minutes!

While there are incredibly satisfying and exciting moments to be found in Cookie Clicker, the majority of the time the game is open will be generally uninteresting and low-maintenance, it is an idle game after all. This makes it hard to pinpoint a specific level of enjoyment that the game provides while playing it, since you are meant to give it varying levels of engagement. And, obviously, the less engaged with the game you are, the less you will have the capacity to be actively enjoying it. I think that the rhythm of the game is pretty easy to intuit in the early and mid-game, where you will be clicking golden cookies and buying new upgrades every few minutes, but as you continue ascending and attaining higher and higher levels of cookie production, the rate you buy new upgrades will slow to be hours, days, or even weeks apart. I have been slowly becoming less and less invested with my save file as I have attained every upgrade and almost every achievement. Because ascensions become less and less powerful the more stacked your legacy already is, I have to wait months for ascending to be worthwhile. The exponentially growing cost of additional towers quickly stagnates the growth rate of my cookie production within each run, and the only way to make a meaningful amount of cookies is to partake in tedious minimaxing of the cookie grimoire and golden cookie spawns. The reason I have persevered so long has been to try and reach the last 3 achievements I need for 100% game completion. I honestly should have bailed a long time ago and only continued chasing the last few achievements due to sunk cost. The worst, and downright unenjoyable, parts of the game are all backloaded. I wish that the achievements were better paced so that you could achieve the last few much earlier, when the game was still exciting at times, which would make for a much better clean stopping point to retire the game.

Despite the slog that the game becomes when hunting down the last few achievements, Cookie Clicker is a pleasant experience for the first many months of play with some extremely high highs. Everyone should honestly try it because it is free and such low commitment. Just DO NOT go for every achievement because getting the last dozen or so is a bad time.

I just replayed this game for what must have been the first time in almost a decade. I remember it being pretty good when I played it as a kid, so I was shocked to discover in this playthrough that this game actually kinda sucks donkey balls.

For starters, the demographic for this game was clearly a MUCH younger audience than any of the previous games. I just replayed the 3 previous games in the Mario and Luigi series, and while they are certainly very accessible and sometimes a little overbearing with how much they hold your hand, Dream Team takes things to a new level of insufferableness. The first ~1 hour of the game is a very long """invisible""" tutorial, teaching you how to control a character in a video game from a third person perspective. I cannot overstate how annoying it is that you are forced to spend an hour going through a tutorial that genuinely seems to have been intended for people who have never played a videogame before, with no option to skip it.

The next hour or two after the opening are still not great. In stark contrast to Bowser's Inside Story, the action commands for your standard attacks are very easy to time in this game, which is a real shame. The tight timing for the action commands in BIS were great because it kept me engaged and focused on the combat's moment to moment gameplay. Another thing that became very apparent early on in the game was the excessive amount of dialogue, the opening especially is overflowing with NPCs that want to talk to you and waste your time with meaningless text. Dialogue continues to be a problem through the whole game; after completing an objective, learning a new overworld ability, rescuing a Pi'illo, and so on, you will be assaulted with words upon words that the game would have been much better off without.

Rescuing Pi'illo folk is one of the weakest areas in this game. There are 52 petrified Pi'illos to rescue, each one housing a mini dungeon, so they make up a significant portion of the game's content. To rescue a Pi'illo you must find it in the overworld, enter the dream world, traverse the dream world to find and destroy x number of nightmare chunks, and then exit the dream world. There is nothing wrong with that formula on its own, it would honestly be nice to have Pi'illos act as miniature challenges to complete within the larger objectives, but, the problem with the Pi'illos is their execution. Firstly, the animation for entering and exiting the dream world is way longer than is necessary, which gets old really fast since you will be seeing it each time you rescue a Pi'illo (as well as any other time you enter the dream world). After you've rescued a Pi'illo it will also always speak to you and they never have anything interesting to say. Many Pi'illo in the same area will even say the same thing to you just slightly rephrased, adding to the amount of time that the game wastes. And as for the actual content in each Pi'illo's dream dungeon, I was always underwhelmed by the challenges you must overcome to rescue the optional Pi'illos as well as the challenges for many of the mandatory ones. Most of the time, the challenge will be something exceedingly simple and very short: advance past a few enemy encounters, find ~3 nightmare chunks in an empty room, complete a very small platforming challenge. A few times it even felt like the animation and dialogue surrounding the Pi'illo rescue missions were longer than the missions themselves. Because rescuing Pi'illos was so unrewarding (you don't get anything meaningful unless you rescue all of them) and felt like a waste of time, I decided to ignore any optional Pi'illos about halfway through the game, which made the experience a bit more bearable. Rescuing Pi'illo folk would have been much more compelling if there were less of them and the challenges in the dream world felt more meaningful.

Speaking of the dream world, even outside of the Pi'illo rescue missions, exploring the dreamworld felt more annoying than fun. The gimmick of touching Luigi's face on the bottom screen to interact with the dream world is undercooked, accomplishing nothing that the buttons on the 3DS couldn't handle while also interrupting the flow of gameplay. Even the parts of the dream world that don't require touch controls to navigate are often unnecessarily cumbersome. You will very often need to summon a hoard of Luigis to progress in the dream world. The hoard changes the already underwhelming control scheme that Mario and Luigi have to be slower and more clumsy. The tornado shape that the hoard can take was especially frustrating due to how slowly it moved vertically. The theming of the dream world also felt pretty lackluster, especially when comparing it to the theming of Bowser's insides from BIS, where everything from the blocks, to the enemies, to the walls and floor were designed to match that theme. While most of the enemies in the dream world are unique, nothing about them is "dreamy", and the only thing surreal about the dream world layouts is that there are things floating in the background and foreground. It would have been much cooler to discover things that only existed in Luigi's imagination in the dream world. All that being said, there are a couple things I did like about the dream world. Battles feel very different there compared to the waking world thanks to the exclusivity that special attacks have in the dream/waking world, the quantity of monsters within each encounter being significantly higher in the dream world, and only having one party member while fighting in the dream world. I also really like the Golden Beanie enemy, which is a rare miniboss that can randomly spawn in the dream world and will flee if you fail to counterattack any of its moves, making its combats very exciting.

I can't end this review without mentioning a specific part of the story that was aggravating due to how badly it was written. I've already mentioned that there is too much dialogue in this game, but most of it also feels poorly written. The scene at the top of Pajamja Mountain was especially poorly thought out, and let me explain why. At this point of the game. Mario and Luigi have just caught up to the big bads, Bowser and Antasma, on the peak of Pajamja mountain. Antasma then starts playing music from nearby speakers which your companion, Dreambert, explains to be the Dreambeats, which is a song that will make all who hear it fall asleep. To escape the Dreambeats and avoid leaving their vulnerable unconscious bodies in front of the baddies, Mario and Luigi plan to escape to the dream world. The problem with this solution is that to get into the dream world, Luigi must fall asleep (which is what they are trying to avoid!). This is not addressed and you simply walk a screen to the left and leave Luigi's unconscious body in the overworld as Mario escapes to the dream world. Immediately upon entering the dream world the dream portal closes behind you and your new objective is to escape the dream world. Nothing you do in the dream world is related to Bowser or Antasma at all, leaving this section feeling completely inconsequential, poorly written, and a waste of time. The cherry on top is when you see Bowser (who is covering his ears with his hands to avoid hearing the Dreambeats) talking to Antasma and responding to what he is saying, meaning Bowser can hear what is going on despite not falling asleep. The fact that there is so much dialogue slowing Dream Team down, feels even worse when you realize that the story the game is telling wasn't even given too much thought.

Aside from the easier gameplay, Pi'illo folk, dream world, and extra heaps of dialogue, the rest of the game is pretty much in line with the other Mario and Luigi RPGs. A few extra details about this game that stood out to me are as follows.
- Giant battles return from BIS and overstayed their welcome a bit but were an alright inclusion overall.
- I was pleasantly surprised to find that the 3D effects in this game look amazing, especially in battles!
- Many of the special attacks the bros can preform utilize the gyro sensor on the 3DS, which unlike the touch controls in the dream world, were actually a fun addition that adds novelty to this game and allows its battle system to stand out a bit compared to the other entries of the series.
- The gags in this game are much wordier than the games preceding it and, for me, ended up falling flat much more frequently.
- The locations in this game felt very generic. Plains, desert, mountain, beach, jungle, and lava castle are all very overused settings in Mario games, which the previous Mario and Luigi games had avoided falling back on.
- Badges and gear are much more unique in this game than the games before, boasting many unique effects that are more exciting than simple stat upgrades. Gaining the ability to equip 2 extra pieces of gear through character customization perks is also very cool.
- There is a hard mode that is unlocked after beating the game once. I wish that hard mode were an option from the start because that very likely would have made the game more enjoyable to me, but I am not willing to spend an additional 30 hours playing this game again to see for myself when that won't fix the problems present outside of the games combat.

Overall, Mario and Luigi Dream Team is a disappointing follow up to Bowser's Inside Story and the worst entry in the series up to that point. It constantly feels like the game is wasting your time and talking down to you with lots of dialogue, tutorials, and filler content. It is sad to see, because other aspects of the game, like the art direction, battle systems, and combat are up to par or even improvements on the previous games. Dream Team has its moments, but they are far outnumbered by the rest of the game's mediocre or even straight up bad gameplay. My disappointment with this game leaves me especially trepidatious about the quality of the last installment in this series, Mario and Luigi Paper Jam, which I remember already not really liking when I was a kid. So if I remember Dream Team being good as a kid I can only imagine how bad Paper Jam really is if I already didn't like it when I was younger.

Reseeded is, for the most part, Plants vs Zombies if it were a better game. I'm a bit of a hater of the original PvZ: it's too easy, it fails to meaningfully explore the interesting mechanical systems that it creates, and many hazards pose no threat as long as you bring the appropriate plant. Reseeded mostly succeeds at fixing all of these problems by increasing the difficulty, rebalancing the stats of plants and zombies, and giving several plants new abilities.

When starting this game, you will quickly notice changes to the plants. Some changes are minor balance tweaks that don't alter how you use the plants too much, such as Peashooter costing 125 sun instead of 100, but many changes are drastic and will significantly change the applications of plants. Some of my favorite changes are Tall Nut costing 425 sun but having a colossal amount of health, Lily Pad and Flower Pot costing 75 sun instead of 25 (making losing one actually feel punishing), and Cactus firing extremely high damage bullets with a long reload time. There are a couple of plants that are still usually worthless, but the rebalancing and increased difficulty make many more plants significantly more worthwhile. Zombies with weaknesses also usually feel less trivial thanks to plant rebalances, such as Fume Shroom's cost increasing more than 3x which makes it significantly more difficult to exploit screen door zombies' weakness.

Even though I think that the difficulty in Reseeded is a significant improvement from the original, it is still my main complaint with the game. There are multiple difficulty modes, which is nice and I can see myself replaying this game on hard mode someday, but the difficulty curve within normal mode (and I presume the other modes as well) is terrible. Zone 1 and 2 are very easy and a little boring. Zone 3 and 4 were a little challenging and 5 was rather difficult. I can easily imagine advanced PvZ players thinking that the game is made for novices and getting bored in the first 2 zones, as well as less experienced players giving up in zone 5 because of the sharp difficulty spike. The game would have benefitted greatly from a flatter difficulty curve. I also often found myself wishing that the game had a speed up button, both to speed through the easy levels as well as the early game of hard levels that I would end up having to attempt multiple times.

I was impressed by how much of the side content is changed in this mod. All of the minigames seem much harder than their original counterparts, and I am an especially big fan of the rework done to iZombie, now called iZombotany, which allows you to place the zombotany versions of zombies. There is also a NG+, like in the original game, but this is radically harder than you might expect. In addition to having 2 plants picked for you at the start of each level, there are exponentially more zombies, I'm talking like 30 zombies being sent simultaneously less than a minute into each level. I was able to beat the first 5 levels using strategies that heavily replied on instants and quick reactions, but I gave up on the 6th. The levels felt very punishing, didn't contain the gameplay loop I love PvZ for, and were repetitive, driving me away from this game mode.

Overall I like this game a lot more than Plants vs Zombies, but because of the awkward difficulty curve I find it hard to recommend to many people. It's also a little hard to give Reseeded a star rating because it has a few low lows, but I did enjoy most of the time I spent playing a good amount.

I really, REALLY wish I could give this game more stars. I.RULE's presentation is incredible! The concept is also extremely appealing to me, a massive fan of TBoI and PvZ. I was obsessed with this game from the moment it was announced on Twitter and I played the original Alpha release as soon as it dropped. I went through the content pretty quickly, and shortly after that I stopped playing because of one major problem that the game had: difficulty.

Back when the game was still very new, the endless gameplay loop of I.RULE got boring to me because the game didn't get more challenging as you looped through the zones. It was easy to get so strong that you couldn't lose, the game was easily solvable, and once I got good enough to solve it that just entirely erased my desire to continue playing.

Fast forward more than a year and the game has gotten many updates. I came back to play it again because I think the concept and style of this game is so perfect, and I was happy to discover that, along with other improvements, my main complaint about the original version has been addressed; the game gets much harder as you progress. Unfortunately, I actually think that there was an overcorrection.

After looping the first time the game quickly ramps up its difficulty, and that is my first criticism with the difficulty system. Clearing the first three zones on normal mode is trivial, it can easily be done without losing any of your chargers (PvZ lawn mowers). This makes the initial run through of the zones feel like a waste of time. Not a huge problem necessarily, but it is made much worse when that ends up being ~half the time spent on each run. I will usually lose runs my second time through zone 2 or 3. This is especially frustrating if your run lost because of reasons outside your control.

Each item and baby only shows up once per run. This means that if you can't afford an item when it shows up in the shop you will never have the chance to get it again. Shops also stop appearing after progressing far enough, so if you didn't get the chance to buy an essential item, there is no recourse. And if 2 critical babies (such as Twin Baby and Fistuloid) show up as options on the same choice, tough luck. Because RNG paired those options together in the same choice, your run will be crippled with no chance to recover later.

To be honest, I don't know how this problem could be solved in a way that would keep the spirit of Isaac intact. The Binding of Isaac is focused on providing the player with unique gameplay experiences each run. The only obvious remedy the the problems I described is to always allow the player to collect things they passed on sometime later in the run. But then, that would mean that every run would eventually end up being the same, with all items and babies collected and no distinct identity. It is a tough problem to solve. Overall I think it would have been better to either remove looping and balance the first loop to be harder, or to allow the confluence of every run to eventually happen and focus the game on score chasing. That being said, I can respect the decision the author made to try and merge the mechanical themes of both of I.RULE's inspirations while adding looping to give the game an distinct identity.

Because the gameplay of I.RULE is so much more restrictive than a free movement game like Isaac or Nuclear Throne, I can confidently say that many of my game overs, especially in hard mode, were unavoidable due to impossibly dense swarms of monsters. Normally I would refrain from making such a claim and assume I have a skill issue, but as someone who has completed all the levels in PvZ ECLISE and is a glutton for extremely difficult Plants vs Zombies gameplay, believe me when I say that sometimes your run will just end because the game decided to make it impossible to clear that level. Obviously, this must happen sooner or later; the game is endless with scaling difficulty. But the balance of that difficulty fluctuates wildly based on factors outside your control, most egregiously in hard mode, where you can quickly lose if not offered useful babies to add to your arsenal or useful items after the first boss.

After replaying it in 2024, I once again see that I.RULE still has the same crippling problem that I had with it in 2022, the difficulty doesn't keep me engaged. But despite all my yapping about this, I still think it is a very good game and appreciate it very much. The difficulty is only a major concern when playing this game for as a score chasing roguelike (or when playing hard mode), which is very unfortunate because it is obviously trying to be one. However, you would probably have a much better time just playing through normal mode a couple times and trying to achieve most of the unlocks. I would really love to see the difficulty better balanced in a future update, and also some more monsters because there isn't much variety, but everything else in the game is very polished. I would be remiss not to mention the impressive attention to detail put into the game. Stunning spritework and animations, very fitting original characters inspired by items from TBoI, thoughtful adaptations of items and trinkets from TBoI, fireflys being extinguished by ice, ice and fire babies being immune to freezing attacks, and more. It is clear that a lot of effort was put into this project. Please check out this game, it is very much worth worth your time.

I had an absolutely splendiferous time playing Bowser's Inside Story and am left hungry for more after completing the game. The concept and theming of this game are some of the strongest among the entire Mario franchise. Seeing the inside of Bowser portrayed in such a cartoonish way where his immune system and such is composed of single-celled goombas and other miniature baddies was a treat for the imagination and that wonder is maintained throughout essentially the entire game. And getting to actually control Bowser as an additional playable character was exactly what this series needed to inject some new life into the game's mechanics and keep the Mario and Luigi gameplay from getting stale.

Unlike the babies from Partners in Time, Bowser is a fully realized additional party member. Bowser has his own attacks, dodge and counter methods, and occupies and affects the battlefield in a completely unique way. His vacuum ability is an inspired way for him to interact with Mario and Luigi in battles, essentially allowing him to partition certain enemies away, for the bros to deal with in his place (not to mention the creative interactions that many enemies have with being vacuumed). This asymmetrical battle system is so unique and flavorful, and I really wish something like it were present in more games. In combat, Bowser feels very different to control compared to the Mario bros. All of his special attacks are controlled entirely with the touch screen. If this were a constant for all special attacks in the game it would risk the touch controls overstaying their welcome, but their high mana cost and exclusivity to Bowser kept their presence squarely in the territory of being a welcome change of pace. I also felt like Bowser's bosses were much harder since he doesn't have an ally to revive him if he faints. Combined with the ample characterization he gets through his dialogue, this made me sympathize with him and contributed to his unique gameplay feel from that of the bros.

This game actually paces the frequency of all its gimmicks incredibly well. A major criticism I had with Partners in Time was that the potentially endless battle items slowed combats down to a crawl. Bowser's Inside Story pays homage to the flavor of its predecessor in a really cute way, by introducing a similarly endless bros attack, being the Magic Window. However, this move was improved from the similar attacks in Partners in Time because it is only 1 of the 10 special bros attacks and most importantly the pace of the Magic Window is much faster than the Copy Flower/Pocket Chomp/etc. Much unlike Partners in Time, each of the special moves at the bros' disposal feel extremely distinct from one another and were able to remain charming through the entire campaign. As for other gimmicks in the game, there are many minigame style sections where the bros manipulate Bowser's body from the inside (such as the carrot minigame, the schmup sections, etc.) and I found all of them to be pleasant diversions to keep things interesting. They, along with everything else in the game, add a lot of character to the experience. However, this is somewhat of a double edged sword.

This series is infamous for having many many tutorials in its games, and that is much more relevant in this game than it was in Partners in Time or Superstar Saga. The frequent introduction of new gimmicks and mechanics throughout the story, as well as the game's increased mechanical complexity brings about more tutorials. I was surprised to find that many tutorials were actually skippable, which will be a huge benefit to the game for additional playthroughs. I haven't played this game in a decade though, so I went ahead and listened to the majority of the them since I had forgotten how some things worked. The game does a lot of work to inject character into all aspects of itself, including its tutorials. This led to things being explained through very unconcise dialogue, the most egregious example being the explanation on how to use the blue shell blocks. Blue shell blocks are very simple, when Mario strikes one he will wear a blue shell until the next time he jumps. While he has a blue shell, pressing B will send him straight forward, allowing him to strike nearby blocks that are across gaps. This simple mechanic is explained by a blue parakoopa through dozens of text boxes across multiple minutes. In that time, this tutorial character also establishes a running gag and his own characterization. It's a good effort to make the tutorial entertaining, but that doesn't change the fact that this completely derails the gameplay to explain a mechanic that could have been figured out much faster by simply allowing the player to use it. As I mentioned, tutorials are pretty common in this game and while I was charmed enough by the game's rich character to not get bored or agitated, I can see these roundabout explanations being a bigger issue to some players.

Aside from the frequent tutorials present in the game, I actually found its pace to be very brisk, maybe even a little too brisk. This isn't a negative, it's closer to a positive actually. The game did such a good job pushing me towards each new objective that I hardly had any time to explore the optional content of the game. I meant to engage with the challenge modes in the Challenge Node as I unlocked them, but I was always so eager to advance the story that I completely forgot to visit the area until after I had already beaten the game. You keep being presenting with exciting new scenarios that it never felt like there was a dull moment. I was also surprised to learn that most of the overworld areas don't get reused by the bros after having been previously explored by Bowser. You are free to go back as Mario and Luigi to most areas that Bowser previously passed through, even though the story never pushes you to. There isn't much to find there, mostly some beans and a few question blocks, but I was surprised that there are some enemies in those areas exclusive to the Mario bros that I expect most players never even encounter because there is no external reward to go back and explore these regions (not to mention that the other enemies you faced as Bowser have slightly reworked attacks to allow Mario and Luigi to dodge them). The fact that the game is constantly throwing new things at you is one of the best things about it, but at the same time I wouldn't have minded the developers squeezing a bit more out of the overworld locations by having Mario and Luigi explore more of them.

And for my remaining miscellaneous thoughts about the game:
I enjoyed the giant battles in this game. I only find this notable because I remember hating the giant battles in Paper Jam. I appreciate that they were a rare novelty in this game.
The difficulty felt like a really good level! A fair bit harder than the previous 2 games of the series and without excessive HP on the bosses to boot.
The gear in this game is more creative than that of its predecessors', which I am greatly pleased by. Adding more customization options to the characters helps make Mario and Luigi feel like mechanically distinct units. Gear like the gloves that double healing effectiveness and the box that discounts the cost of a random special attack every turn are great pieces of equipment that the player can use to change up their gameplay style.
The boss rush in the Challenge Node is bullshit! I regret trying to clear it and will avoid it next time I play this game. I could win if dying was my only concern, but you have a limited number of turns to kill all the bosses, so there is basically a stat check for attack to beat this boss rush. I beat the main story at level 29 as Mario and Luigi and I felt like it was an appropriate difficulty. The boss rush suggests that you attempt it once you are level 50, and to grind EXP if you are too low leveled. This is honestly a waste of time and I am very surprised that that sort of padding was put into the game when it is so quick to discard so many other ideas that I would have liked it to expand upon instead. Also there is no boss rush/rematches for the Bowser boss fights which is a bit of a bummer.
I am really not a fan of the final area (Peach's Castle). It feels very generic compared to every other area in the game, and the recycled enemies present there that are just pallet swaps of enemies you have previously seen does not help in this regard.

With everything being said, I think this game is amazing and one of the best Mario games, full stop. You should play it if you haven't already! I enjoyed this so much that I will likely be playing the remake, after I've finished replaying the rest of this series, so I can experience the game again.