This could've been my favorite Metroid gameplay wise BUT they screwed up the music so badly. The tracks I remember are just so agressively mid and whatever. An exciting soundtrack can save a game for me, but Dread made me realize a souless soundtrack also can kill a game to me. I've heard many people say they could bypass it due to the excelent sound balancing helped to immerse them... I'm just not one of those. With a mid soundtrack even performing the coolest of tricks and fighting the best bosses feels like nothing.

Pikmin 4 is a gimmick-fest of the game. Just about every aspect feels as safe and marketable as possible. Bringing the amount of captains back down to 2 was the right move, but having the other one be an indestructible reddit doggo that can be upgraded to be even more OP was not the move. This game is crowded, uninteresting, and did irreparable damage to the worldbuilding the series was carefully building since the very first game. This game prioritizes RTS micromanagement over actually convincing you of the world and the dire situation you're in. It's just about everything I didn't want Pikmin to become.

In an optional, visually stunning level in the early Jungle world of the game, players can peek through the leaves and foliage to see pirate ships, docked by the beach in the distance. That same beach and those same pirate ships make up the scenery for the game’s second world, and as you progress further through it you notice more and more how the ships are showing up torn and mangled to pieces. By the end of the world, the weather grows stormier and a huge octopus appears from below the surface, gruesomely tearing ships apart in the background of the stage before challenging the big ape himself.

Donkey Kong Country as a series has never placed any real focus on its storytelling, yet as all its fans will tell you it is shockingly good at being atmospheric and moody. And while Returns specifically often gets buried inbetween the praise for the original trilogy and Tropical Freeze, I find it excels at this in a sort of unique way - by having the entire island truly feel like one big, cohesive entity. The scenario I described earlier is never called attention to, yet takes place over the course of about 10 levels, with each step being a very gradual shift from one environment to the next whilst still adhering to their worlds’ visual themes. While many other platformers strive to impress you with their creativity and variety, I find there’s a beauty in trying to make each level feel like a natural progression of the world - that it’s not simply a collection of fun video game environments, but the natural extension of a living, breathing world.

The “Returns” subtitle doesn’t feel like its simply there to denote the franchise coming out of hiatus, but to quite literally describe the game as the first since the series’ inception to truly place the focus on Donkey Kong Island itself. There’s no kidnapping, no journeying, no drastic environmental change - this game, even more so than the original 1995 game, is about showing you the ecosystem and inhabitants of Donkey Kongs home. This is part of why I find the Tiki Tak Tribe to be such a good antagonistic force for the game: rather than turning the conflict into just a brawl against an invading faction, their brainwashing powers mean that now every part of the island is hostile and out of balance to serve someone else’s agenda. Whilst the Tikis take control of an inhabitant of each of the island's areas to serve as the game’s bosses, each area in the game is also befitted with one or more natural rulers outside of this - the Squeekly bats of Crowded Cavern are left completely undisturbed by the mole miners of the cave area, the horde of Muncher spiders in the forest devour anyone who gets close, and a large eyeball-robot observes your every move in the Factory level, seemingly manipulating your progress forward. Throughout this involuntary tour of the island, it feels as DK is constantly intruding on the’ territory of these rulers, disrupting the natural ecosystem and flow of life, to quell a conflict they barely seem aware of. The harmony between rulers and the natural state of the island has been disrupted by the Tikis, all for the sake of them believing their own king is the one who deserves to rule the island as a whole.

So then, with all that said - who’s the ruler of the Jungle?

That’s right - Donkey Kong.

What makes the grueling difficulty of this adventure in particular feel so rewarding to overcome is that, similar to Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, it truly feels as if the great ape is asserting his absolute dominance with every world he conquers. Frail as he may seem with only being able to take two hits, he moves with such a visceral weight, slamming onto the heads of enemies with both fists and hitting the ground with a slight thud every time he lands. It’s theorized that a big part of why Donkey Kong himself was sidelined in the Country series in favor of his extended Kong family was due to the difficulty in nailing both the weight and size of this character – play the original Donkey Kong Country, and you’ll notice DK’s silhouette drastically changes when he’s standing still, running, and jumping, which leads to a somewhat inconsistent feel moving the character around. To have this grand return of the character not only emphasize his weight and power, but also seemingly theme the entire story around reasserting his rightful place as ruler of the island, just feels absolutely perfectly befitting. Yet he defeats the king of the Tikis atop DK Island’s volcano, not to claim any sort of dominance or rule of his home, but to return things to the way they were before, and reform that balance of nature. Indeed, in both narrative and design this Return is not here to say that the new should rule and the old has no place, but that all kings have their place in the world.

There are a lot of very valid reasons as to why the game isn’t as fondly remembered as the rest of the series, mostly attributing to Retro Studios’ unfamiliarity in designing for the genre. A big one is the way collectibles are handled, an area the game falls completely flat on compared to how perfectly the trilogy handled it. The puzzle piece system may be a cute way to unlock concept art, but when these somewhat-short levels can have up to nine puzzle pieces on top of the KONG-letters, suddenly the pacing in stages come to a screeching halt. It’s cool that you’re consistently rewarded for pattern recognition, of seeing a stray banana just barely off-screen and following it to reveal a hidden path, but with up to 13 collectibles per stage you’re just bound to miss one lest you check quite literally every possible hiding place one could be in. That means moving left at the start of every level, scraping against every possible wall, collecting every single banana, blowing on every dandelion, and intentionally dying in every split-path just to give yourself the opportunity to double-check the other path. The KONG-letters are far stronger collectibles in terms of how the game is themed, as they’re consistently rewarded to you for actively platforming well and utilizing DK’s abilities to the fullest rather than for having the keen eye of an explorer. The fatigue that can set it from feverishly looking for these collectibles may only enhance the somewhat repetitive level progression: Imagine the feeling of mastering everything a level has to see, only to realize that the next feels virtually identical aside from having a focus on bouncy flowers now.

The game sticking to the standard visuals of its area relatively closely may again be a remnant of Retro’s work on Metroid Prime - rather than indulge in whatever crazy level concept the team could think up for a one-off level akin to Super Mario 3D World, each level is given a sort of purpose on the island, a significance that forms part of the whole. At first, I questioned the sudden appearance of a pirate ship level in the Ruins area, since I was already well past having beaten the Beach area. It was only after I played the level and later reached the world’s boss that the dots connected: The pirate ship level focused on firing explosive bombs, and the boss of the area is a great bird who hoards a collection of explosives all to itself. This not only lets the level serve as great preparation for the properties of these explosives, but can easily be pieced together to form worldbuilding theories, of the pirate crew bargaining with this greedy hoarder to gain access to this artillery. There’s even a great care placed on moving Donkey Kong from area to area, as the first level of most worlds opens with a brief moment of letting the player transition out of the old area into the new, showing for instance the overgrown edge of the caverns leading naturally into the Forest area.

Beyond all of this analysis and babble, the game remains a great platformer first and foremost. The game is still extremely successful at providing that rewarding escalation of challenge that DKC has historically done so perfectly, paired with controls with tons of speed potential. Even though the Wii version in particular has been derided for its Wii-isms, I can’t stress enough how often I feel it genuinely adds to the experience. From your own shaking matching the intense pummeling DK lets out onto the Tikis at the end of each world, to the Wii remote speaking giving you direct and gloriously satisfying sound feedback to each enemy you bop and collectible you get, to genuinely feeling the weight of the handslam attack…

Okay, so maybe the simple, primitive part of my brain took over just now, the part wanted to just call this game a fun, well paced, good platformer from the start without doing this silly literary analysis. And, well... who am I to challenge the king of the jungle?

[Playtime: 8 hours]
[Key word: Reclaim]

Feels like a JRPG made by people who have experienced the genre strictly through TV Tropes writeups. If it were developed by Americans, people would talk about it as though it were Doki Doki Literature Club.

There's a consistent tension in the game between shame about its stylistic heritage and a deep, paralyzing cowardice that keeps it loyal to it. This tension manifests in the story's insistence on being about a world, down to the constant availability of a lore encyclopedia, despite the complete irrelevance of any details of this world to the plot and its ultimate reliance on some of the most rote and formulaic character drama in the series. It's present in the faux-naturalism of mid-fight Marvel quips stuck between uncomplicated, cosmologically-correct monologues about human connections. It's clearly what's motivated the inclusion of empty open-world sections that divide up a linear action game paced around its levels being played one after the other: the game is willing to go to any lengths to avoid being called a hallway.

My favorite symbol of this tension, though, is game's repeated use of a minor key scale as background music: Prelude, but fucked up.

The main cast is completely disallowed any kind of personal complexity or ambiguity. Clive spends the earliest hours of the game denying a painful fact about himself, and this is the first and last display of personal weakness, selfishness, or any form of moral iniquity made by him or any other party member. Each of the rival summoners, by contrast, is given a designated sex thing: promiscuity, obsessiveness, and an Oedipus Complex, respectively. These traits serve as a kind of crude claim to maturity on the part of the game, and the characters to which they're attached are barely developed. No member of the cast rises above a broad archetypal characterization, and Clive himself is no exception, but the most insulting character's Jill. Her role in the story is to love Clive, which she does quietly and without demands. This is briefly interrupted by a revenge plot in which she kills an unambiguously evil cultist for having hurt her, and feels much better afterward. There's a scene in Final Fantasy IV in which the female party members are told by the lead to stay behind for their own safety while the men head to the final confrontation: naturally, they don't listen. In XVI, Jill is told the same thing and stays put.

Dialogue alternates between purely functional exposition and agonizing attempts at humor, with no real attempt to build distinct voices. I do have to give credit to the actor playing Clive, who is obviously trying to complicate very simple lines through his delivery, but it's a losing battle. The character animation is noticeably low-quality in comparison to the series' 6th and 7th generation entries.

The soundtrack is sterile, and the visual design never rises above the level of clean spectacular sightseeing. I can't speak much to the systems design, but interesting fights on normal difficulty are spread extremely thin and more or less only appear in optional content. Feels more like playing A Realm Reborn than any other single player RPG with which I'm familiar.