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 and 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!

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.

To be entirely honest, I don’t see why this is the game that Nintendo fans have been clamoring about for the last decade plus. I went into Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door expecting to have a good time, but in actuality, I often found myself frustrated or bored while playing this.

The obvious problem with that game that is frequently cited by its dissenters is backtracking. It’s true, this game has an ungodly amount of backtracking in it, even more than I was led to believe by the game’s detractors. There is of course Chapter 7, which infamously forces you to backtrack to every location that you have previously visited, but the majority of the other chapters in the game require backtracking as well. Chapters 2, 4, 5, and 6 all have significant backtracking segments, like a seriously inexcusable amount of backtracking. Ironically, I found the backtracking in Chapter 7 to be less offensive than that in any of the other chapters. While Chapter 7’s fetch quest is the most blatant disregard for the player’s time in TTYD, that quest is at least over and done with before long. In the other chapters that I mentioned however, the entire chapter is completely riddled with quests, locks, and keys that force you to retread the same ground, that you literally just explored, multiple times. And the nail in the coffin for this topic is Mario’s overworld movement, which leaves a lot to be desired. Mario is very slow and the game has a lot of friction and just feels a little jank in the overworld. Even the option to run has baggage attached to it, as you need to switch Yoshi in as your active party member to run, and while dashing on Yoshi, you can’t talk to NPCs, jump vertically, or open doors, which will slow you down as you repeatedly mount and dismount Yoshi to perform these essential tasks. TTYD is downright miserable at times because of how unconcerned the game is with keeping things moving along at a reasonable pace.

It is a really big bummer to me that TTYD is held back so much by its overworld traversal, because the battle system is really fun. Turn based battles punctuated by action commands is a good formula, and the breadth of combat options that Mario and his partners have in this game is wide and very creative. But even when looking at just the combat, I still think this game fails to be very compelling. The encounters in this game are incredibly easy. Even though I challenged myself in this playthrough by exclusively choosing BP as my level up reward and banning the use of Power Bounce, most enemy encounters and even some bosses failed to hold my attention. TTYD fails to truly capitalize on its great battle system until Chapter 8 and the Pit of 100 Trials, leaving much of the game’s remaining combat feeling underwhelming.

I think Paper Mario 64 should have been the game that fans dreamed up a revival for instead of TTYD. The two games are mechanically similar, but I found PM64 to just be miles more enjoyable to play. It doesn’t have the problem with backtracking that TTYD has, its combat system (while simpler) feels more balanced, and to be honest TTYD’s subversive tone isn't anywhere close to as appealing to me as PM64’s cozy storybook aesthetic. TTYD is clearly designed to contrast PM64's comfy tone, placing Mario in a gritty and grimy setting including things like the mafia, a gallows, a bomb threat, catcalling, and locations that you would never see in another Mario game. I understand that TTYD’s willingness to break the Mario mold is exactly why many of its biggest fans like it so much, but I find it to be contrarian for the sake of it and just generally less appealing than PM64’s genuineness.

TTYD also attempts to repeat some ideas in the original Paper Mario, but ends up doing a worse job at them. The penguin murder mystery in PM64 is cute, short, and such a subversion to expectations that it is humorous. In TTYD, the bomb threat mystery isn't funny because it doesn't subvert the game’s tonal expectations and it massively overstays its welcome by taking up half the chapter. I have a similar problem with the Sewer of both games. The sewer is a place you may explore between chapters in PM64 to discover optional goodies, but in TTYD you are forced to visit the bottom of the Sewer each chapter to progress and it has a deliberately antagonistic layout, featuring one way paths and pointless roadblocks, that makes it very annoying to explore. TTYD also feels very obtuse at times, when that was never a problem I had with PM64.

The one thing that I think TTYD does much better than PM64 is its action commands. Even though both games have very similar action command systems, TTYD has a much more diverse pool of them. Multiple partners and attacks in PM64 will share the same or similar inputs, whereas TTYD will have either altered or entirely new inputs for each attack. Unlike the action commands in PM64 the action commands in TTYD do not end up feeling overused by the end of the game, and stylish moves and super guards really help with engagement, so I do have to give it credit for that.

I wouldn’t quite say I had a bad time playing TTYD, but I certainly wouldn't call the experience overall a good time either. It is a very mixed experience, featuring many lows and some highs. While TTYD does feature improvements over PM64 in its battle system, it fails to capitalize on that strength during the majority of the games length and I greatly prefer PM64 thanks to its simpler and more streamlined design and cozy vibe. To me, TTYD honestly seems like one of the most overrated games in the Nintendo sphere.

The main character of NITW, Mae, is incredibly rude, immature, and irresponsible. This game is Mae's story, rather than the player's, and that left a huge disconnect between what was happening in the game and how I wanted the events to unfold. There were dialogue options, dialogue sequences, and events that Mae carries out that paint her as a selfish idiot. Having a despicable main character isn't damning on its own, but what really grinds my gears is that many of the selfish things Mae does are either retroactively made out to be justified, or they are hardly acknowledged and she faces no consequences for them.

Beyond my gripes with Mae, the game is sometimes obnoxiously slow paced. The routine of walking left for a few minutes each in game day to start the next scripted event, the lack of a run button, dialogue that doesn't relate to any existing characters or plot threads that also isn't funny, insightful, or interesting, corridors with nothing to interact with and no interesting visuals. It felt like my time was being wasted many times throughout the game.

The pacing of the story is also very strange and I found it unsatisfying. The first half of the game is mostly exposition for Mae's life and hometown, which is fine, but then out of nowhere the genre of the game shifts from a slice of life walking sim into a mystery narrative based game. The thing that ruined the last quarter of the game for me was that it felt extremely disconnected from the rest of the game. The mystery has next to nothing to do with any of the existing characters and entirely derails the narrative focus away from Mae learning what she should do next with her life and how to improve herself as a person. This leads to a very confusing ending where Mae hasn't actually grown at all and leaves the entire story feeling pointless.

There were definitely some good moments in the game, but they are far outnumbered by the boring or frustrating moments.

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 am already Pokemon Platinum's strongest warrior, but this hack brought Sinnoh to the next level. It has a wonderfully wide selection of pokemon to catch, much more challenging and deliberately designed bosses, and the additional content as well as the optional patches to buff weaker pokemon and increase the game speed really helped this hack create its own identity separate from vanilla Sinnoh.
My only complaints are that the start and end of the game have some unnecessary level jumps (which I found especially annoying in the early-game since you don't unlock the Blissey training room until the mid-game) and sometimes fourth wall breaks from NPCs really took me out of the game and made me groan a bit.
I strongly recommend this excellent game to any Pokemon fans who aren't afraid of a little challenge.

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.

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.

Danganronpa's fanbase preceded the game itself and turned me off from playing it for years. When I played it myself, I was quite surprised to discover that it is actually really fun! The mysteries are written pretty well and most of the dialogue (which is most of the game) kept me eager to read more because it would be funny, progress the plot, or offer clues useful for solving a future mystery. That being said, a non-negligible chunk of the dialogue was pretty cringe, commonly featuring immature jokes about boners, boobs, "doing it", off color kinks, etc. Sometimes this stuff was so bad it got a laugh out of me, but plenty of it did nothing but make me embarrassed to be playing this game, so I can see this making the game much less appealing to some people.

If you can handle some cringe dialogue and enjoy other visual novels/text focused games I would really recommend playing this game, despite whatever impression its fanbase may have left on you!

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.

Partners in Time was one of the first video games I had ever beaten. I played it several times as a child. I went into this playthrough hot off the heels of Superstar Saga, which I played for the first time much later than Partners in Time, and greatly enjoyed in my most recent playthrough. In my mind I remembered both of these being great games, but with a more mature perspective, I'm sad to say that Partners in Time does not hold up.

Almost all of the mechanics of Partners in Time are borrowed from Superstar Saga, which I never thought anything of as a child but as an adult I found it a little disappointing that this game had so few new ideas. But of course, the one major addition in this game is the inclusion of Baby Mario and Baby Luigi as playable characters...unfortunately. I went into this playthrough fully expecting to have a grand old time, but the babies, among other issues, add a lot of friction to the game that bogs down the whole experience.

In concept, I like the idea of the babies being here a lot. Superstar Saga has great combat but its a little bit too simple, ergo the babies can alleviate this problem by adding more complexity by allowing you to control 4 party members at once. That's what I was expecting anyways, but as it turns out, that isn't really how they work. In the majority of combat scenarios, you will only be controlling Adult Mario and Luigi. The only time that the babies really ever have any presence in combat is if you either let one of the older bros faint, in which case their younger self will take their place, or when using some of the battle items. As for the first case, this will almost never happen; Partners in Time is a very easy game. Even though I purposefully went through areas underleveled and with low-defense gear, there were few opportunities where either of my bros would faint and allow one of the babies to replace them in combat. And even in the instances where the babies are on the field, I can't imagine any scenarios where you would have them do anything other than either use a 1-up mushroom to revive their older self or flee from combat. The babies are comparatively impotent to their adult counterparts, leaving no reason to battle with them when other options are present (which there always are). And the fact that only Mario OR Baby Mario gets an action each round essentially makes it so that the babies don't even function as 3rd and 4th party members, they are functionally much more like extra lives for each bro within the individual battles.

The problems with the babies don't end with their role in combat. In the overworld they are nothing but an annoyance. NONE of the platforming or overworld traversal with the babies was a positive addition to the game. Many of the overworld puzzles and obstacles require sending the babies and adults in different directions and then backtracking to regroup before advancing. This type of obstacle format gets extremely overused and annoying after you've seen each iteration of it more than once. Even when you don't need to backtrack, such as when collecting a bean from the overworld, simply getting the babies dismounted from the bros to access their overworld skills is just inconvenient enough to get very annoying by the end of the game.

As for non-baby related grievances I have with this game, the battle items have 2 major flaws that made the combat much less enjoyable than that of Superstar Saga. Firstly, the battle items should cost mana to use, like in all the other games of this series. In this game you collect copies of each item and then can use as many as you want in battle. This allows you to spam battle items, which you will have a practically endless supply of due both to their overabundance and presence in shops. This breaks the pacing of battles by removing the need to refill your mana after using so many special attacks. Multiple times in this playthough, this allowed me to have such aggressive offense that I would kill enemies before I ever got to see any of their attacks. My second major issue with the battle items is that the powerful ones take SO LONG to execute. Several battle items continue endlessly until either you mess up an input or the enemy dies. This sounds cool on paper, but the execution in the game makes the player's turns take forever. I feel like the majority of the time I spent in battles was spent using Copy Flower or Pocket Chomp, which got old REALLY fast. This seems like a massive oversight, because the most fun part of many combats is dodging the enemy attacks, since they are much more varied than the moves you will be repeating ad nauseum from your own arsenal. Although, maybe not fun enough, as I felt like a decent number of the bosses in this game had way too much HP and not enough unique attacks to keep their combats engaging. Combine these problems of long turns, low variance, and excessive boss HP, and it made the combat system of this game massively overstay its welcome.

A couple other, much more minor, complaints I have with the game are that the game was too easy, the first ~90 minutes of the game were a total slog of tutorials, beans are basically less than worthless since they are annoying to collect and don't even unlock useful badges, and the time travel in this game makes absolutely no sense for no reason. Like seriously, it is confirmed that the player's actions are changing Adult Mario and Luigi's timeline in the past, but if the adult bros' original timeline didn't have Future Mario and Luigi come from the future, bootstrap-style, to defeat the Shroobs in their past, then how did they fight off the Shroobs originally when the adult bros were babies? The time travel not making sense really is a non-issue, but it kinda shocks me how little thought seems to have been put into the semantics of it.

DESPITE ALL MY COMPLAINTS, I do still think that this game is kind of good, I GUESS! Nothing in the game is outright bad, its just that almost everything in the game goes stale kinda quickly and overstays its welcome, even with the game taking me a pretty short 11 hours. The one thing that I think this game did really well was the art, which was so good it got me pregnant. :)

Yume Nikki is not for everyone. It is very slow and there is very little actual 'game'. The experience is almost entirely exploring open areas searching for something interesting among a sea of fantastical things which are paradoxically mundane. I actually found the experience to be similar to browsing 4chan, as it is a very meandering activity, with some unsettling or even disturbing undertones, where you genuinely have no idea what you will encounter next.

Somewhat frustratingly, it is not plausible to actually reach the credits of the game without either spending several hours meticulously combing every single area nor using a guide. I found the game to be most enjoyable when using a spoiler-lite guide to direct me to the general vicinity of each of the collectible effects without spoiling what I would encounter along the way.

I tried this game in high school and found it boring, but I enjoyed it when I came back to it a few years later. To enjoy Yume Nikki, you need to be in the right mental state and not be expecting something that it isn't (i.e. a more traditional video game).