I don't know who needs to hear this, but before you engage with my Wall of Nitpicks, I just want you to know that I had a lot of fun playing this game. It is very good. Here, I'll even give you a paragraph of the things I love about it.

This game is drop-dead gorgeous. The camera angle not being top-down anymore is a bit disorienting at first, but I do recognize that keeping it low to the ground helps emphasize just how small you are in comparison to these massive areas. You get to explore a lot of man-made structures, including a portion of a house, probably my favorite area of the game. Dandori Challenges are like the mission modes from Pikmin 2/3, but have been integrated into the main game, and they fit in very nicely. Caves are no longer randomly generated, therefore intentionally designed, and they're better off that way. The night expeditions are a fun distraction, even if they're pretty simple in execution. Pikmin tower-defense is a neat concept that I wish they did more with.

Alright, time to nitpick.

I really do not like Dandori Battle, if I'm being honest. The versus modes across the Pikmin series have always felt like afterthoughts to me. They're fun with friends, but not much else. In a 1P vs. COM setting, I just don't see the point. That, and I am absurdly bad at them. Feel free to slam me with the "dandori issue" insults, but the amount of unpredictable chaos just feels out of place to me. They also chose the worst possible style of split screen: a vertical slice. I can't see anything around me, how do you expect me to react to my opponent's actions, even though they're taking up the right half of my screen?

Why is the lock-on so bad in this game? Why can I not turn it off? Why is it exclusively automatic? Why is this such a downgrade from Pikmin 3's lock-on, which worked perfectly? Didn't this company effectively invent lock-on in Ocarina of Time, back in 1998? I feel like there's plenty that it shouldn't lock onto as well, like stray material shards. The lock-on also prevents you from throwing more Pikmin than necessary at items, which is a bit too hand-holdy for my tastes. Adding more Pikmin makes items get carried faster, but it's like the game wants you to not do that, and focus your attention elsewhere. It considers that task "done", and I'm here to say that you don't make those decisions for me, game.

Speaking as someone who finished ultra-spicy difficulty in Pikmin 3 Deluxe, I'm not sure how this game benefits from limiting the amount of Pikmin you can have in the field, and restricting you to using three Pikmin types. I know there's an overwhelming amount of choice when you have eight Pikmin types in a single game, but that's completely undermined by the game letting you push a single button to give you the exact types of Pikmin you'll probably need. Why would I ever use tools like the Survey Drone when the auto-select gives me an idea of what to expect anyways?

Oatchi is a very good boy. Too good for his own good, in many cases. It's not particularly hard to take down most enemies by gathering your team on Oatchi, charging a rush, and slamming your face into your foe. New additions like Ice Pikmin only amplify this kind of power imbalance as well. Spray 'em, Rush 'em, freeze 'em, shatter 'em, and turn them into more spicy spray droplets than I know what to do with, Oatchi alone is just that useful. On the other hand, I feel like the Pikmin AI has regressed a tiny bit. Pikmin seem to do whatever they damn well please once they've finished a task and should go idle. Instead, they gravitate towards anything they possibly can, whether it be something to carry, or something to attack. Listen, I love these little guys. I do my best to protect them, and feel remorse when I fail to do so. HOWEVER, when Steve casually decides to 1v1 a sleeping Bulborb of his own volition? That's his own damn fault, he was asking for it.

The pacing can be a real drag at times. I'm not talking about the moment-to-moment gameplay, I'm talking about the dialogue and cutscenes. Lots of repeat dialogue to sit through, and repeat cutscenes that you'll find yourself (graciously) skipping. The characters didn't really charm me as much as I think Nintendo hoped they would. They sure talk a lot for crew members that are sitting back and watching the Oatchi Rush Livestream all day, every day. Collin told me to rewind time because I lost a bunch of Pikmin during the final boss fight. Not cool, Collin. Not to mention there's like, a 30-second load time between the end of day animation and actually seeing your results. Many of the castaways you save have side missions for you to do, but they're all just busywork and things you'll already be doing anyways. Everyone begging Nintendo to add achievements to their games needs to realize that Nintendo can't make an interesting set of side objectives to save their life. The best rewards are saved for the absolute end of the game, when you won't have a damn reason to use them at all, because everything you can do has been done.

Listen, I'm sorry to those who think this game is a masterpiece. I'll reiterate, I still had a ton of fun with this game, my rating is just a stupid number! All the Pikmin games are good (except maybe the 3DS one) and you should play them! Miyamoto and his team cooked this one for a full decade, and you can feel that with how much content is condensed into this game. It may have ended up being too much for me though.

The days of the licensed movie tie in game are long dead, but the days of completely random, absolutely psychotic licensed games are here with Scrat as a shining example. A truly baffling platformer, Scrat just fuckin runs through random places without a care in the world in order to get nuts so he can nut. One of the greatest things about the game is that sometimes Scrat needs to pick up key nuts to progress through locked doors, and unlike every other platformer where picking shit up hinders your abilities and makes you slow as shit, Scrat runs at the same speed AND you have access to all your movement shit. So yeah if you want to shovel pure jank shit into your mouth it would not be a mistake to shovel Scrat's nuts into your mouth.

PAC-MAN, FAT MAN, YELLOW AND YELLOW AND YELLOW MAN
TELL ME 'BOUT THE COLOUR OF YOUR GHOST
IF PART OF YOUR SOLUTION ISN'T ENDING THE POLLUTION
THEN I DON'T WANT TO HEAR YOUR WAKA'S TOLD
I WANT TO WELCOME YOU TO PAC-MAN'S WORLD

I'M CALLING OUT FROM PAC LAND
I'M CALLING OUT FROM PAC MAN'S WORLD
IF YOU WANNA BE FREE
YOU BETTER LISTEN TO ME
YOU GOT TO LEARN HOW TO SEE IN YOUR FANTASY

If a walking simulator fails to deliver on the story front, then what worth does it really have? Not much is the answer. Little Misfortune isn't much fun to play, so you would hope that the overall narrative makes up for any shortcomings in the gameplay department, but apart from an occasionally charming protagonist, there's not much else to champion. The gallows humour is only intermittently amusing, the core mystery isn't very mysterious and the attempt at a hard-hitting emotional ending doesn't come close to landing.

The real misfortune here is wasting three hours on this borefest, and that ain't little!

Finally pushed through and finished this one after months of putting it off. Engage is a great game, don't get me wrong. This game had a chokehold on me for the first half of it but as it went on, the story got way too unnecessarily ambitious. There were way too many twists and turns that it turned into something I didn't care to be invested in by the end. That being said, the ending was absolutely beautiful and specifically the cutscene with all the emblems right before the final battle. (shoutout to my boyfriend for pulling up the cutscene on youtube when I accidently skipped it). It got me excited for a fight the first time in awhile.
The gameplay was great for the most part. I loved the engage feature, it made fights more fun, finding new and creative ways to take down enemies. The maps were very fun, with terrain effects and gimmicks that made the game not as repetitive.
The characters were enjoyable but compared to the close-knit groups in three houses, they fell short. This game made it a lot harder to achieve A-Support with units that by the end, I was disappointed with the amount of content I wasn't able to see. I can see it being easier if you grind support with a few select characters but me being me, I like to give everyone a chance to participate and Somniel activities and battle (Except Saphir and Lindon, screw them. Literally had to just look up their names, that's how much I don't care about them). A few of these characters became very dear to me, my favorite being Zelkov. Honorable mentions include Pandreo, Amber, Alcryst, Rosado, and Merrin.
As far as units go, this game has some broken characters. I can literally send Merrin off on her own to take out a large group of enemies and she is fine. No one even comes close to even hitting her. A few characters who also are very close to that level of broken are Panette, Kagetsu, Diamont, Yunaka and Timerra. Most of these units can be pretty self-sufficient and were a consistent staple in my army.
I found the game overall enjoyable. It wasn't perfect by any means but it wasn't bad at all. I thought the running sibling theme really worked for a game like this. Maybe it was because I didn't get supports up all the way up but some of the characters didn't even feel like they were close to the characters who were written to be close with other characters. EX: Diamont/Amber, Merrin/Timerra. To me, that just takes away from the close-knit feeling that games like three houses gave me. So perhaps that's why I wasnt as emotionally invested in this story. Some of these characters who are saving the world together felt like absolute strangers. Overall, I'm glad I got to play this game and I'm glad I got to know some of these characters from the franchise that I didn't know about before. For a long time fire emblem fan, I can see this being a great crossover game and a solid stand-alone game with its own story. I usually can tell by the end of a game if its something I'll ever go back to. For this one, I can't tell. Mainly because 'New Game+" isn't an option. If it were, I might be tempted to get support conversations that I wasn't able to get in my first playthrough. But since its not, going back to it feels pointless and starting a new game would feel like a chore. So for now, I'm done with it. It was fun for what it was :)

playing the demo for babylon's fall is a bit like watching the slow-motion death of video games occurring before your eyes. this miserable game, limping onto store shelves covered in the wounds of a visibly disastrous development cycle, is only able to offer a substantially slower, less responsive version of the combat system of a game from 2017, deliberately stripped back and wounded in order to accommodate a miserly loot grind that actively makes the game worse in order to sell to you a season pass, a battle pass, and a daily treadmill running endlessly towards a carrot labelled "the prospect that this game might eventually be fun" kept forever out of reach. it's not just a bad videogame, it's a game deliberately made worse, stripped of all potential to be good, in order to try to sucker more money and time out of you.

this is the kind of game that platinum's ceo wants to be making rather than the by-most-accounts very good Sol Cresta. what the actual fuck is going on at this company. someday there's going to be a tell-all documentary about what was going on behind the scenes at Platinum in the past decade or so and it will be one billion times more entertaining than this dreck

I don't normally write public reviews since I feel like I'm not critical enough, but it's a special occasion, as this is apparently the 300th game I've beaten in my life. And because this is a) an obscure enough game that b) a ton of people actually have easy access to (via it being on Nintendo Switch Online) but are likely to write off because it sounds goofy, I'm going to try and encourage you to give Spanky's Quest a look.

The easiest praise I can give this game is its music. There aren't that many tracks in total but some of them are REALLY good, especially around the midgame. The sprites are also cute and colorful, and the general aesthetic is super charming.

But what really captivated me about this game is its unique gameplay. You throw a bubble and bounce it off of your head, and the more you bounce it, the bigger the bubble grows and changes in color. You then choose when to pop the bubble, and depending on how big you've grown it, it will turn into a sports ball with different effects: the first stage is a weak baseball with a basic arc, the next is several soccer balls that fall downwards in a line, the next is a volleyball which has a small range on its own but will multiply and explode outwards if it hits something, and the last is a line of big basketballs that cover a large range. Hitting an enemy with your bubble will stun them, but you have to use one of the popped bubbles (aka the sports balls) to actually defeat them.

The game is divided into a series of worlds which themselves are made of ten levels (including a boss). In each level, you must find enough keys to advance through the locked door, and the number of keys required varies by level. Sometimes the keys are just sitting around, but they can be picked up and carried by enemies which you must then defeat.

Now, the big point of frustration in this game: you have a very small amount of lives, and EACH HIT takes away a life. Spanky is not a very agile creature; there's a delay to his floaty jump, and it's often very hard to avoid the enemies- especially because they have a tendency to fall out of the sky onto you. Your first time in a level, you'll have no idea what you're dealing with and are likely to get hit as you're figuring it out. When you lose all your lives/hits, you get sent back to the beginning of the entire ten-level set. This essentially means that you'll be replaying the same early levels again and again and again just for the chance to make it to later levels and figure out what to expect, how to avoid the enemies and where you need to go.

That is, of course, if you're stubborn like me and insist on playing classic games without using save states or the rewind feature. If you're less scrupulous, you'll have a much easier time. But I tried to get the experience as if I was really playing it on the SNES, and... whew. The last regular set of levels in particular was mind-numbingly frustrating, as there are a couple levels in that set with enemies bouncing all around and falling from the sky and it's basically sheer luck to make it to the door without getting hit. (Note: there is a password system for going between worlds, although there is no saving otherwise.)

As for the bosses, once you figure out a pattern that works for you, they're pretty easy to do damageless. However they have way too much health and take too long, turning them into a test of patience. And of course the trial and error nature of this game applies here, so you can easily get punished and sent back to the beginning of the world when you're figuring them out.

The real fun of this game comes from learning the level sets - for instance, there are some levels with extra keys you can get that will make later levels easier, since you can carry extra keys from level to level. You'll also benefit from finding hidden bonus rooms or other places where you can get extra lives, which will help you a lot in the long run (especially since bonus rooms help you conserve your keys). I had put so many attempts into a certain level set before I learned that throwing the bubble onto a cannon can sometimes make an extra life shoot out. But I'll leave other methods of obtaining hidden bonuses for you to figure out. All of this still doesn't make up for how absurdly punishing and random the last world is, though.

I would say this for most anything, but: if you approach this game without save states/rewinds, you're going to get more out of the challenge aspect and finally getting through a world will feel super rewarding and satsifying. However, it WILL be frustrating, you WILL die to things that are unfair or that you had no way of knowing were coming, you WILL grow to absolutely hate Spanky's flailing around hit-animation and the sound that goes with it, and all of this WILL be a turnoff. It's why I stopped playing this game a year and a half ago, and just recently picked it back up and beat it. So it's up to you how you want to approach this if you check it out.

But I love unique gameplay systems and I became weirdly passionate about this strange little game, despite its many flaws. It's better than yet another caveman-based platformer, probably.

A middling brain empty button masher where you equip things with big numbers to do missions that are lower than your number. These missions consist of empty hallways that don't force you to engage with them at all and four to five forced combat encounters. Most of the missions are just completely recycled level design wise outside of like 4 levels with such unique mechanics like... basic platforming.

The gameplay loop is very simple. Go to boring mission with number suitable to yours, mash on light and spectral attacks for 5 minutes, replace your shit with shit of a higher number, repeat. Because it's designed as a GaaS you don't get options to a lot of mission types and loot mechanics until late in the launch campaign, the most egregious of which is the ability to keep gear of a certain rarity up to your gear level, which unlocks with four missions left before the final boss. Not that it takes too long, with cutscenes skipped (because who can really care) it took me seven hours to complete the launch story, after which there are a couple of other stories and a bunch of random modes to get your gear level up. Ultimately, it's all the same shit and evidently it wasn't enough to have people stick around.

And so lies Baby Fall, another weird Platinum project to add to the list of other weird, failed Platinum projects. At least unlike the TMNT game and that Korra game people won't be able to play their grand failure for long. I'm happy Bayonetta 3 got a warm reception because if that shit died a death like this thing I'd struggle to see how they'd recover.

Skully is almost a decent game but there's enough that's off here that unfortunately sets the experience back a lot. Skully is a puzzle platformer where the platforming is marred by dumb design decisions and the puzzle stuff can be more annoying than it's worth.

The main gimmick of the game is that you are a small skull thing and you transform into one of three large creatures when submerging yourself in checkpoint ooze. Little skull boy controls well enough but when you're a big boy the cracks in the platforming begin to show. Just weird shit like momentum being halted when you land from a jump to a different altitude (not just jumping down to a platform, but jumping up too) and shitty air control just makes shit annoying, and not in an engaging way. My favourite thing early on were these water spouts that if you got hit by them in big form you just froze for a solid like 2 seconds. It's fucked up, I tell you!

The big boy forms also serve the puzzle aspect of the game. You'll use their various abilities to move platforms and throw skulls around and whatever. The problem here is when it should all be coming together in the third act using all of them for stuff, it just becomes painful because if you fuck up it usually means death which means going through the same summoning processes over and over again.

The worst puzzle in the game requires you to summon three dudes, you'll be switching between their bodies numerous times, you'll be moving a platform to a perfect position outside of your line of sight and you'll only know if you fucked up by the end of your attempt of this puzzle, and then you'll have to throw your skull body to the perfect position four times. if you fail to avoid the stalactites above or simply over/undershoot your target (which is easy as you aren't given any indication that your throw will or won't be blocked by something) you will instantly die and have to spend like five minutes setting up another chance at the thing. Also when you leave a body it spits you up, sometimes at a random angle that can kill you for no reason if you did it over death water. This puzzle maneuver drove me to madness and there's still like 4 chapters after this!

So yeah that's Skully. It's almost fine but there's too much pain and it makes me sad.

Yeah yeah here's another one in the million "game good but holy shit the performance" review on this site. I'm scoring lower on the average because the graphics and the performance really are just completely inexcusable. Outside of a true open world experience there's no reason for the performance to be this shoddy. Graphically it ain't doing much, and the game cuts every single corner to save on performance and still can't muster a decent framerate. Literally every NPC/Pokemon/blade of grass on the fucking ground in the game deloads if you walk 2 feet away from them and unless you're directly next to them their animations are running at a significantly lower frame rate it's fucking astounding.

But yeah outside of the game looking and running like doggy doo doo the openess and general structure should be the new standard for the franchise. The pokemon are good (Anihilape is easily a new top five fave for me) and the characters are great with Nemona being the best friendly rival character they've ever done. I will continue to hope for a future where Pokemon games can have time to be properly worked on and polished but every game sells 10 million in its first three days regardless of anything so that won't ever happen and I'll end up playing the games through Very Legal Means At A Very Fair Price.

MagnificentMrMads Halloween Marathon #1


As someone who enjoyed both Evil Withins (1 is a bit flawed but I absolutely love 2) it truly gives me no pleasure to call Ghostwire: Tokyo the worst game I've played this year and one of the worst open world games I've played in the last few years.
Everything from the shitty fog that blocks content to the spirits floating around detract from the admittedly gorgeous setting of Tokyo that Ghostwire finds itself in, with each locale being a visual treat (alongside the few scares the game throws your way). Makes it that much more unfortunate that most of what you'll be doing is the mentioned shitty side content or dealing with the various Gates that dispel fog and open more of map. I'd say the gates offer varied combat encounters IF the combat wasnt spammy dogshit with no real way to make better since you can't combo any of the elements together or really change how they function besides making things faster through upgrades which are locked behind side content (or grinding money). Does not help that traversal in this game boils down to running from place to place or using the occasional floating tengu to get around mixed with really fucked gliding. Story as well doesn't really have much going for it besides Akito and KKs cute banter because of cookie cutter characters and a villian who looks really cool but is just as nothing as his lackies.
Don't really have much else to say besides to not play Ghostwire Tokyo. If I had to reccomend this game it'd be on Game Pass (when it inevitability hits it) or on a DEEP sale because I'd rather play an Ubisoft game then deal with this bitter disappointment.

3/10