Mishelam
A lot of the games in the collection kind of suck, but it has Puyo Puyo.
This is my favorite Ace Attorney game. I don't think it's the best, or the most coherent, but it's my favorite. I really like the idea of trying to use logic with something that's completely illogical (this is why I liked the trials in Layton vs. Wright since you had to make fucking magic make sense), so I really enjoyed the new trial mechanics. Also even if she isn't used that much, grown up Maya is really cute. Like really, really cute.
2014
A very standard roguelike, but I don't remember it doing anything wrong either.
Better than Lost Valley, but that's an incredibly low bar.
The music is excellent and I like all the options you have to decorate houses, but I wish there was just a little more to the game. Maybe a puzzle mode or something.
2015
Probably the ugliest version of Toki Tori, but it's still a decent puzzle-platformer. I'm also only now realizing that the game is called Toki Tori because you're a bird that can rewind time.
The game is just alright, but I love the amiibo that Capcom released to go along with this. You can take the riders off the monsters and switch them around. It's neat.
I bought a New 3DS for this.
I really liked Mario Sports Mix for the Wii. The games were all fast-paced and enjoyable.
This is nothing like Mario Sports Mix.
This is nothing like Mario Sports Mix.
2017
This is still my favorite Sony exclusive. Kat's new forms/styles/whatever they're called add just enough to the traversal to keep things fresh, while the visual upgrades from the original release or remastered made the game's unique style more appealing than ever.
The actual combat is kind of boring, but you can just use the gravity mechanics to ignore the combos and turn Kat into a giant projectile.
The idea of an RPG collectathon is pretty neat and I liked how you used your monsters to traverse the world, but the game just falls flat in so many places. Combat is dull since most of the damage is done by AI controlled monsters, there are only like 15 different varieties of monster to recruit in a game about exploring with a custom party of monsters (there are like 70 total monsters but most of them are just recolors), and some of the super important legendary story treasures you need to beat the game are just laying around in the overworld with no plot attached to them. It kind of feels like the game was rushed out to meet some kind of deadline, which is really weird since Square Enix released a bunch of other low-budget JRPGs (Valkyrie Elysium, Star Ocean 6, Harvestella, DioField Chronicle, etc) within a few months of this game. It hurts to rate a DQ game this low since it still oozes charm and I enjoyed playing it, but it's by far the weakest DQ game I've played, spin-off or otherwise. It's not a bad game and I'd still say it's worth checking out if you like the idea of it, but don't go in expecting too much.
Kingdom Battle was a surprisingly good game, so I'm not surprised that I enjoyed Sparks of Hope. I am surprised by how many downright cursed ideas Ubisoft actually managed to implement well. The Rabbids talk now, but I actually don't mind it. Yeah Rabbid Luigi is a bit annoying, but Rabbid Mario being a kind of scummy Italian-American or Rabbid Peach being a braindead valley girl works way better than it should. The titular Sparks, an unholy combination of Rabbid and Luma, are actually kind of charming, and are incredibly useful in battle. The shift from a linear game to more open zones with a staggering amount of secrets and optional battles also works strangely well, and lines up with Sparks of Hope's whole idea of emulating the 3D Mario games instead of the 2D ones. Ubisoft also made the kind of changes you'd expect to see in a sequel (Mario has two guns now instead of one, characters are more unique, you have direct control of your party on the overworld instead of controlling Beep-O, you move freely in battles instead of on a grid, etc.) I had a few technical issues, came across some bugs, and the game seems to have some kind of memory leak issue where load times get significantly longer the more you play the game in one session, but for a Ubisoft title it was surprisingly polished. I ended up liking the game so much that I went for 100% completion in the base game, but I'll probably take a long break to play a few other tactics games before I come back to the DLC. Apparently the Tower of Doooom is a kind of roguelike mode so I might check that out soon, though.
2017
It was a pretty average open world game, but man I love the aesthetic of this and Forbidden West. Yeah it's mostly kind of generic "nature reclaims the ruins of past civilizations" stuff, but dash of ancient civilization makes it a bit more memorable. What I love, however, is the machine design. The way these metal giants move and interact with their surroundings, the way that they lose parts as you fight, or even how you can kind of see their intended purpose when you look at their construction is just great. Frozen Wilds also had excellent snow physics, but that's really all I remember from it.
Granted I also remember liking Days Gone so maybe I just have awful taste.
Granted I also remember liking Days Gone so maybe I just have awful taste.
2022
This review contains spoilers
As a video game, this is basically a straight improvement over 2018. More enemies, a new weapon, more boss variety, more varied environments, more customization for Kratos through the shield and amulet, so on and so forth. But as a story it kind of sucks. 2018 wasn't the pinnacle of storytelling or anything, but every action served the central purpose of trying to get to the highest peak in the realms to scatter Faye's ashes. In Ragnarök, most of the story until the final act is just kind of meandering. Yeah there are some nice character moments, but the plot as a whole is basically just "Wow I don't want to go to war with the gods. Turns out Odin's a huge dick and he killed an already dead dwarf so let's go to war with the gods." For a 40+ hour game, it felt like surprisingly little happened until the final act where all of the major plot points were shoved in.
The game was also surprisingly buggy for a big, polished first party release that came bundled with my Playstation 5. There was one time where a dark elf got stuck doing its jumping action and I couldn't kill it, there was a little rock skipping minigame that would always mess up the lighting on the water whenever Atreus threw a rock, there was a time where Brok was in a cutscene and at his forge at the same time, stuff like that. It never crashed or anything but that's a really low bar for a game like this. There were also little things like how Kratos's hands just clipped through any climbing chain that made the game feel kind of unpolished. Normally I'm not super focused on stuff like that but I feel like a game that's trying to be super serious and cinematic inherently emphasizes its polish far more than the kind of stuff I usually play does.
The game was also surprisingly buggy for a big, polished first party release that came bundled with my Playstation 5. There was one time where a dark elf got stuck doing its jumping action and I couldn't kill it, there was a little rock skipping minigame that would always mess up the lighting on the water whenever Atreus threw a rock, there was a time where Brok was in a cutscene and at his forge at the same time, stuff like that. It never crashed or anything but that's a really low bar for a game like this. There were also little things like how Kratos's hands just clipped through any climbing chain that made the game feel kind of unpolished. Normally I'm not super focused on stuff like that but I feel like a game that's trying to be super serious and cinematic inherently emphasizes its polish far more than the kind of stuff I usually play does.