Kirbyster
2023
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!
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!
2013
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 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.
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.
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.
2022
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.
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.
This game is really cute! There is a lot of charm with the retro 3D visuals reinterpreting Celeste, as well as the obvious homages to 3D Mario platformers. It was a little annoying that there wasn't a button to set the camera behind you, but I had no significant complaints other than that. Definitely worth checking out since it is both free and very short!
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.
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.
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. :)
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. :)
I can't do this game justice in a little written review. See this video review I made for my meticulous thoughts on the game: https://youtu.be/MWfRn5wUzbo?si=YckMhSDCk8Bb6uH4
2016
I downloaded Pokemon Go on launch day in 2016 and I have had a lot of great times since, playing this 'game'. Its a great excuse to ride my bike and go on walks with friends, and filling in the Pokedex is fun too.
All that being said, the gameplay mechanics are terrible. Actually catching the pokemon you find is really repetitive, the rewards you get for leveling up stop being useful or interesting relatively quickly, and the battles are usually just boring stat checks that take a couple minutes to pass.
Despite the limited and uninspired gameplay, I still really like Pokemon Go because it created its own niche and fills it really well. It gets me to exercise, makes running errands more enjoyable, and it is legitimately exciting to catch a meta relevant pokemon that has perfect IVs. The monetization of the game is also surprisingly friendly to free players, allowing you to buy most premium items after capturing gyms for a few days. I don't see myself quitting this game unless either a better AR mobile game comes out or the game is made inhospitable to free players.
All that being said, the gameplay mechanics are terrible. Actually catching the pokemon you find is really repetitive, the rewards you get for leveling up stop being useful or interesting relatively quickly, and the battles are usually just boring stat checks that take a couple minutes to pass.
Despite the limited and uninspired gameplay, I still really like Pokemon Go because it created its own niche and fills it really well. It gets me to exercise, makes running errands more enjoyable, and it is legitimately exciting to catch a meta relevant pokemon that has perfect IVs. The monetization of the game is also surprisingly friendly to free players, allowing you to buy most premium items after capturing gyms for a few days. I don't see myself quitting this game unless either a better AR mobile game comes out or the game is made inhospitable to free players.
2023
Rhythm Sprout has excellent style, humor, and music. What more could you want in a rhythm game? The mechanics of the gameplay aren't anything new for rhythm games, but I think it executes the "Taiko no Tatsujin" kind of gameplay better than any other games I've played. It also offers a lot of replayability with its turbo-speed and randomized level options. Pick it up for a very fun 3-4 hours clearing the levels, plus however long you want to spend getting achievements and full combos!
A great debut for this goated series! The pixel art is delightful, the humor is charming, and the setting is actually unique.
The existence of this game's "Beanbean Kingdom" makes me wonder if all the kingdoms in the Mario world are plant themed. I wish that more Mario games explored other locations like this, places that have their own lore and themes beyond plains, desert, lava, etc.
There are a couple minor kinks in the experience, such as the infamous tutorials present throughout the entire series, but nothing substantial enough to bring down the fun. I'm tempted to replay the whole series since this game was such fun.
The existence of this game's "Beanbean Kingdom" makes me wonder if all the kingdoms in the Mario world are plant themed. I wish that more Mario games explored other locations like this, places that have their own lore and themes beyond plains, desert, lava, etc.
There are a couple minor kinks in the experience, such as the infamous tutorials present throughout the entire series, but nothing substantial enough to bring down the fun. I'm tempted to replay the whole series since this game was such fun.
2017
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.
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.
2020
The easiest way to explain what Temtem is like is to compare it to Pokemon.
In many ways Temtem is Pokemon but done better. The balancing of Temtem is divine when compared to Pokemon, which has creatures like Delibird that are practically unusable in any and all circumstances. Every Temtem is meant to be viable. The difficulty and overall gameplay are also better and more engaging than any Pokemon game. Every battle being a double battle makes the turns much more interesting by allowing synergy between your team to flourish while also making type matchups much less one-dimensional than Pokemon, because having a type advantage against only one of the two opponents still leaves you vulnerable to attacks from the other.
There are also many tweaks to mechanics in Pokemon that just improve the battling formula significantly. The Power Points from Pokemon, which limit the number of times you can use a move without returning to a Pokemon center, have been entirely reworked into a stamina system, which I think is the best addition to the battle formula. Stamina depletes as you use attacks, with more useful attacks costing more stamina. This adds an entirely new layer to battling and teambuilding which I really enjoyed. Moves with a "hold timer" as well as the changes/additions to status effects are also great changes that differentiates this game from Pokemon and nerfs especially strong abilities like sleep.
Inside battles, there is no RNG at all, which I have enjoyed as a somewhat competitive player. Randomness can be very fun in Pokemon at times, but I don't think that it has a place in a game trying to be a skill/strategy based competitive game. There are still random events in the singeplayer, such as encountering luma (shiny) Temtem, but there is no randomness within battles themselves.
Breeding has also been made significantly easier than it is in Pokemon, by removing the randomness of getting a monster with perfect SVs (IVs in Pokemon). The process is too complex to describe here, but the short version is that by using held items you can guarantee that you will get a Temtem with perfect SVs in every stat by breeding a group of tems together that each have 1 different perfect stat. Moves (including egg moves) can also be remembered at any time by simply going into a tem's summary screen! Unfortunately, breeding leads to the first major problem I have with the game, which is the cost of in-game items.
The previously mentioned items that allow you to breed perfect SV tems are consumable, and cost a prohibitively large amount of in game currency. Doing any of the optional side activities in this game costs currency. Raid dens, the battle frontier, participating in "dojo wars", breeding, TV (EV in Pokemon) training, even USING FAST TRAVEL, all cost in game currency. Once you have a good team of Temtem and can farm money by rematching gym leaders and winning games on the online PvP ladder, these costs are not as punishing, but getting a good team is either extremely expensive or extremely time consuming.
I bred an Anahir with all perfect SVs after beating the game. I had about 200k in currency after beating the game. Breeding this perfect tem cost me about 180k, and that was just to get one perfect SV tem before even TV training it. I ended up with multiple perfect Anahir and am able to sell some of the extras in the auction house to make back some money, but at the price that perfect tems go for in the auction house, I will barely break even after selling the extra perfect tems I bred, which isn't even to mention that I have to wait days (or maybe even weeks) for someone to actually decide to buy them. Getting an entire team of 8 perfect Temtem is not possible with only the money you get from beating the campaign, even if you are the one breeding them. This sucks because to make money you need to already have good Temtem.
To fill out the remaining 7 positions on my team, I just used any member of the species I wanted regardless of what its SVs were, and got to TV training. TV training presents a similar problem, you can use consumable items to TV train Temtem, but they are very expensive. Because I was broke (and couldn't make money yet due to not having a team of TV trained Temtem already) I had to TV train by knocking out wild tems (just like EV training in Pokemon). This was a brutal process. TV training all 8 tems took around 5 hours of just grinding, even though I was training multiple tems at once and in optimal training locations. This is by far the worst part of the game IMO. Stamina, SV hacks/glitches, and breeding are great examples of how Temtem transforms outdated or unnecessary mechanics from Pokemon to be more streamlined and intuitive, and it shocks me that they didn't do the same for TV training. There are some locations where TV training a specific stat is relatively painless because only 1 temtem can spawn in the tall grass which always drops 3-4 of the desired TV, but other places (such as the optimal location to TV train speed) have only tems that yield a small amount of TVs each, and also has additional encounters that provide TVs for stats that you don't want, which you will need to run from, wasting more of your time. TV training is actually worse in Temtem than EV training is in Pokemon, as you can only get one of the TV yield boosting hold item, and it doesn't even increase yields as much as the power items in Pokemon do. Yes, you can TV train Temtem with consumable items quickly, but that is expensive and not possible after merely beating the campaign; everyone will have to TV train a team manually to start off and it is a major turn off and I can see it pushing many players away from trying the postgame.
The only other thing that I think Pokemon does better than Temtem is the general world design/atmosphere. The music in the game is not bad by any means, but it is not as good as the music in any of the Pokemon games and doesn't really work as music to casually listen to outside the context of playing the game. And in most Pokemon games, talking to NPCs is satisfying just because they have interesting things to say about the town they're in or Pokemon that live nearby. The NPCs in Temtem are almost all a waste of time to talk to. Even many of the dialogues from NPCs during cutscenes were incredibly boring and I ended up skipping through them without reading sometimes--something that I have never felt the need to do in a Pokemon game. This isn't to say that there is no interesting lore in Temtem, but it is drowned out by the masses of uninteresting NPCs that just waste your time. Temtem does at least have a quest tracker that shows on the map if there are NPCs that want to give you a quest or have an item to give you, which is a very nice QoL feature, but it doesn't excuse the terrible dialogue.
TLDR: Temtem does most things better than Pokemon, such as competitive, difficulty, tweaks to the battle systems, online features, and reducing frustrating RNG. It especially outperforms the most recent Pokemon games with the impressive amount of polish underlining the entire experience. The game does, however, fail to fill the world with interesting NPCs or make the postgame accessible to players who aren't willing to go through a multi-hour grind.
This game is great! It has learned from many of Pokemon's mistakes to make a new and better, although still not perfect, experience. If you just want to play the campaign singleplayer and don't care about postgame or competitive, go for it. The 40-50 hour campaign is great and much more engaging than a Pokemon campaign. If you want a competitive monster battler like Pokemon that is more balanced, with no RNG, and many unique improvements over Pokemon's battle system, this game is great for that as well.
Also people complaining about the premium currency are misinformed. Exclusively cosmetics, with no in game effects, can be purchased in the game with real money.
In many ways Temtem is Pokemon but done better. The balancing of Temtem is divine when compared to Pokemon, which has creatures like Delibird that are practically unusable in any and all circumstances. Every Temtem is meant to be viable. The difficulty and overall gameplay are also better and more engaging than any Pokemon game. Every battle being a double battle makes the turns much more interesting by allowing synergy between your team to flourish while also making type matchups much less one-dimensional than Pokemon, because having a type advantage against only one of the two opponents still leaves you vulnerable to attacks from the other.
There are also many tweaks to mechanics in Pokemon that just improve the battling formula significantly. The Power Points from Pokemon, which limit the number of times you can use a move without returning to a Pokemon center, have been entirely reworked into a stamina system, which I think is the best addition to the battle formula. Stamina depletes as you use attacks, with more useful attacks costing more stamina. This adds an entirely new layer to battling and teambuilding which I really enjoyed. Moves with a "hold timer" as well as the changes/additions to status effects are also great changes that differentiates this game from Pokemon and nerfs especially strong abilities like sleep.
Inside battles, there is no RNG at all, which I have enjoyed as a somewhat competitive player. Randomness can be very fun in Pokemon at times, but I don't think that it has a place in a game trying to be a skill/strategy based competitive game. There are still random events in the singeplayer, such as encountering luma (shiny) Temtem, but there is no randomness within battles themselves.
Breeding has also been made significantly easier than it is in Pokemon, by removing the randomness of getting a monster with perfect SVs (IVs in Pokemon). The process is too complex to describe here, but the short version is that by using held items you can guarantee that you will get a Temtem with perfect SVs in every stat by breeding a group of tems together that each have 1 different perfect stat. Moves (including egg moves) can also be remembered at any time by simply going into a tem's summary screen! Unfortunately, breeding leads to the first major problem I have with the game, which is the cost of in-game items.
The previously mentioned items that allow you to breed perfect SV tems are consumable, and cost a prohibitively large amount of in game currency. Doing any of the optional side activities in this game costs currency. Raid dens, the battle frontier, participating in "dojo wars", breeding, TV (EV in Pokemon) training, even USING FAST TRAVEL, all cost in game currency. Once you have a good team of Temtem and can farm money by rematching gym leaders and winning games on the online PvP ladder, these costs are not as punishing, but getting a good team is either extremely expensive or extremely time consuming.
I bred an Anahir with all perfect SVs after beating the game. I had about 200k in currency after beating the game. Breeding this perfect tem cost me about 180k, and that was just to get one perfect SV tem before even TV training it. I ended up with multiple perfect Anahir and am able to sell some of the extras in the auction house to make back some money, but at the price that perfect tems go for in the auction house, I will barely break even after selling the extra perfect tems I bred, which isn't even to mention that I have to wait days (or maybe even weeks) for someone to actually decide to buy them. Getting an entire team of 8 perfect Temtem is not possible with only the money you get from beating the campaign, even if you are the one breeding them. This sucks because to make money you need to already have good Temtem.
To fill out the remaining 7 positions on my team, I just used any member of the species I wanted regardless of what its SVs were, and got to TV training. TV training presents a similar problem, you can use consumable items to TV train Temtem, but they are very expensive. Because I was broke (and couldn't make money yet due to not having a team of TV trained Temtem already) I had to TV train by knocking out wild tems (just like EV training in Pokemon). This was a brutal process. TV training all 8 tems took around 5 hours of just grinding, even though I was training multiple tems at once and in optimal training locations. This is by far the worst part of the game IMO. Stamina, SV hacks/glitches, and breeding are great examples of how Temtem transforms outdated or unnecessary mechanics from Pokemon to be more streamlined and intuitive, and it shocks me that they didn't do the same for TV training. There are some locations where TV training a specific stat is relatively painless because only 1 temtem can spawn in the tall grass which always drops 3-4 of the desired TV, but other places (such as the optimal location to TV train speed) have only tems that yield a small amount of TVs each, and also has additional encounters that provide TVs for stats that you don't want, which you will need to run from, wasting more of your time. TV training is actually worse in Temtem than EV training is in Pokemon, as you can only get one of the TV yield boosting hold item, and it doesn't even increase yields as much as the power items in Pokemon do. Yes, you can TV train Temtem with consumable items quickly, but that is expensive and not possible after merely beating the campaign; everyone will have to TV train a team manually to start off and it is a major turn off and I can see it pushing many players away from trying the postgame.
The only other thing that I think Pokemon does better than Temtem is the general world design/atmosphere. The music in the game is not bad by any means, but it is not as good as the music in any of the Pokemon games and doesn't really work as music to casually listen to outside the context of playing the game. And in most Pokemon games, talking to NPCs is satisfying just because they have interesting things to say about the town they're in or Pokemon that live nearby. The NPCs in Temtem are almost all a waste of time to talk to. Even many of the dialogues from NPCs during cutscenes were incredibly boring and I ended up skipping through them without reading sometimes--something that I have never felt the need to do in a Pokemon game. This isn't to say that there is no interesting lore in Temtem, but it is drowned out by the masses of uninteresting NPCs that just waste your time. Temtem does at least have a quest tracker that shows on the map if there are NPCs that want to give you a quest or have an item to give you, which is a very nice QoL feature, but it doesn't excuse the terrible dialogue.
TLDR: Temtem does most things better than Pokemon, such as competitive, difficulty, tweaks to the battle systems, online features, and reducing frustrating RNG. It especially outperforms the most recent Pokemon games with the impressive amount of polish underlining the entire experience. The game does, however, fail to fill the world with interesting NPCs or make the postgame accessible to players who aren't willing to go through a multi-hour grind.
This game is great! It has learned from many of Pokemon's mistakes to make a new and better, although still not perfect, experience. If you just want to play the campaign singleplayer and don't care about postgame or competitive, go for it. The 40-50 hour campaign is great and much more engaging than a Pokemon campaign. If you want a competitive monster battler like Pokemon that is more balanced, with no RNG, and many unique improvements over Pokemon's battle system, this game is great for that as well.
Also people complaining about the premium currency are misinformed. Exclusively cosmetics, with no in game effects, can be purchased in the game with real money.
2004
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).
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).