Xenoblade Chronicles is a pretty good game until 2/3rds of the way through when it becomes the most boringest game ever.

It's also peak anime fake deep. Like in the way that it names characters after figures in Gnosticism and other religions and then just expects that to mean something on its own.

It was pretty great before it became super super boring though. The characters were all fun and they (mostly) played off each other well, the gameplay was super fun and interesting, and the game looks fantastic. It's in that category of wii games alongside twilight princess and last story and pandora's tower and some others that go for a semi-realistic style, but with some anime stylings and some really muddy graphics. It's definitely a look and a vibe, and it's a shame it was ruined by the incredibly ugly remaster that came out recently.

As for this port it's very bad. It runs well and is technically impressive, but god this game shouldn't be experienced on a handheld. This is a tv game and only a tv game. You lose so much out of the experience of seeing it on a large screen while sitting on a couch or whatever. So much that it ruins the game in a lot of ways. It really gets rid of that classic grand epic rpg feeling the story has.

Just emulate the Wii version and hook up your computer to the tv or put a rom on a hacked Wii instead of trying to play this port.

you guys need to cool it with saying everything looks like studio ghibli, if anything this game felt like watching a gobelins film (and stylistically looks like half of all gobelins films tbh), especially in its tone and its general theming and atmosphere and presentation, so basically all of it. This game really feels like a gobelins film.

But like gobelins, this game is quite short, which is good, and something so rare in this medium which is understanding how much time a game is worth. This game is simple and wants to tell you a short story and there's nothing wrong with that, that is infinitely more preferable to having it drag on longer than it should for sake of "content". Like there isn't enough content in the game already for it to be fully enjoyable and get across to you every emotion it wants to.

I just finished this game as of writing this, and I keep going back to everything in the game, stuff that I didn't get or otherwise stood out to me, and after putting them into the broader context of the rest of the game, not only do I understand them completely, but appreciate them greatly. Everything in this game is designed so expertly, the pacing the story the mechanics (besides the last puzzle that was really finicky), they all flow together perfectly and there's never a frame in this game that looks ugly, there's never a moment in it that goes wasted, and there's really nothing else I could seek to add to it, it is wholly and completely, well, complete.

I have an immense love for video games that take design seriously, the idea that you don't just need game design and stuff like replayability to make a good game. That games aren't just gameplay mechanics, they're stories, stories which are expressed cooperatively through an audiovisual medium. To ignore the design of how the camera can sit in every map in the game, or how the loading screen can sometimes separate the experience of playing a game into something akin to vignettes, actually taking into account the cooperate storytelling aspect of video games and designing the other aspects with it in mind and it with the other aspects in mind and the other aspects with the other other aspects in mind as well. It's something incredibly difficult for any piece of art, and especially hard for a video game to do, but it is always something to admire and love when a game even attempts to do it.

Mario Bros Wonder is unfortunately an extremely lethargic game that feels like no one working on it was having any fun. It does the bare minimum and then leaves it at that, which for a series that has been bereft of creativity and fun for years does certainly seem like a breath of fresh air, but it needed to be so much more than that. I was genuinely shocked at how unfun this game is.

It sort of says a lot about your series when you feel the need to make up an excuse for you to be creative. Genuinely, a ton of my problems with how this game feels would be alleviated if the dumb flowers didn't exist. The entire point of the game is to be wacky and creative and fun but a lot of that is diminished when you section all of it off. How much more fun would it have been if for one level you're just suddenly controlling a goomba or turned into a ball instead of having to play through the same cookie-cutter levels this series has been churning out for decades before getting to have fun. A lot of spontaneity is lost through only letting the unique stuff happen as a consequence of touching the wonder flowers, and that sort of saps the fun out of it all. I want to be shocked and surprised by the strange ideas in this game but every time it's about to happen I get a big colorful warning.

And the wackiness itself is very underwhelming. The level designs are so often just more Mario Bros junk that it'll feel indistinguishable from playing any other game in this series like 70% of the time. It doesn't help that the abilities given to the player are insanely underwhelming. Your four power-ups are very poorly designed. I don't get what the point of the bubble flower is. There's like 15 badges that let you jump higher and farther more consistently and easily than the bubbles and their other function is killing enemies, which the fire flower already does. Speaking of, that thing has no right being in this game. it feels very vestigial, and doesn't serve much of a function in any level. It doesn't help how similar the bubble flower is to it, but also like, why have it at all? This game is meant to give us something fresh, but its afraid to buck the least consequential tradition? I guarantee you that if they left the fire flower out no one would have cared. The drill mushroom was fun and levels were actually designed around it, although not every level is, and some of them can be cheesed with it pretty easily. But yet again it doesn't really get much to do, you never have to use it in inventive ways and it isn't tactilely fun to use. The Elephant Form is ok I guess. It would be a very middling to forgettable power-up in a better game, but the fact it makes you large it unique enough to make it stand out in this game. But none of these power-ups are ever developed. They don't have a skill set you need to learn or are used creatively in puzzles, there's next to no point in them.

The same could easily be said about the badges. My god. There isn't a single badge that changes up your playstyle enough for it to matter. They're supposed to be picking up the slack of the power-ups but they themselves are so wholly uninteresting that nearly all of them are just straight copied from older Mario games. And worst of all, none of them are fun. I messed around with all of them and never found one that elevated my enjoyment of the levels. Partially because this game's levels are just so boring and aren't really built to accommodate them, but also because none of the badges are that fun to begin with. The rope one was promising but only being able to aim in front of you, especially when the right stick is right there, completely unused, was a real let down. You can play through every level with every badge equipped and your experience every time will be the exact same. Why even have them, honestly? They don't add anything to the experience. They aren't fun, and by god that final badge is so lame and not worth getting. There's just not enough to the badges.

There isn't much to this game as a whole, honestly. Which was pretty surprising for me when I realized it. It's pretty short and all its levels are short as well, which isn't a bad thing, and in fact I hope the Mario series going forward learns from Wonder and doesn't unnecessarily bloat itself with too many levels or collectables, which has been a problem for the series in the past. But, like, it's ending was weird, right? Like it's "final world" is only five mediocre levels without even another Bowser Jr. rematch. More importantly, by the halfway mark I began telling myself "I will still like this game if after I'm done collecting all the Royal Seeds Bowser still gets to make his giant wonder happen". It's threatened constantly and it was the only justifier I could thing of for why all the levels thus far have been pretty mundane and uninteresting. They were saving everything for the final world, or would do something even cooler with the idea of giving Bowser power over all of reality, like having to go through the worlds again but with everything crazy and insane, or having to go through wacky messed up levels to find wonder flowers that would make them normal again. My mind was going rampant, which mostly just goes to show how uninterested I was with the game at that point. What it amounted to, by the way, was a boring final level that used a bunch of the previously done wonder gimmicks and a boss fight that would be a fun world 3-8 boss but is very anticlimactic for a final boss. It just feels unfinished, like there's a bunch missing from the game and ESPECIALLY its ending.

Continuing from the lack of any big moment or gimmick for its climax, this game's roaster sucks. This series has eighty billion characters and you're telling me that the best they could do for playable characters is yellow toad? The prevalence of recolors when there's more than enough Mario characters to fill its roaster is just another sign to me that this game is either unfinished or nobody cared at all while making it. Poor Birdo doesn't get raised out of the Mario Kart void that Daisy's been suck in for decades, but red yoshi gets to be playable? You went to all the trouble to make like 20 badges that suck and nobody will ever use, but you didn't feel like making even someone like Toadsworth or Captain Toad playable? Like if they really were strapped for resources and time then they could have at least made each yoshi its own distinct character. Add a tuft of hair on one of them and call it the Yoshi from ttyd, it really wouldn't take that much effort. Also I refuse to let Nintendo pretend that yellow toad is a real character that people actually care about on the same level as Luigi or Daisy. Stop putting him in things.

I thought this game was going to be the shot in the arm Mario needed to be fun again, but all it really is is New Super Mario Bros but it looks pretty. And, make no mistake, this game's really nice to look at, although I must say that its soundtrack is really bad. Not a single song from this game is going on my phone's folder of mp3s that I use a 3rd party app to listen to. It's all super simple and boring. Like very uncomplex songs with not a lot going on, which for a series that spent the last decade solidifying grandpa jazz as its musically identity is pretty odd. Especially since I'd think they'd want to go really grand for this game since its supposed to be the next era of Mario. Although the hollow music does pair nicely with the empty game design.

Ultimately, Mario Wonder is lucky it exists in a franchise so lacking in creativity and fun that even the imitation of it is worth celebrating.

This game doesn't have any mighty b rep in it and that's unforgivable

I played the arcade mode twice and like, I still am having a hard time figuring out how it's different from just playing a random cpu match, and I played like an hour of the online play, and I feel like I've experienced everything I'll get out of this game. I've only played as korra so far and I intend on keeping it that way because she's the only character that looks fun. Her moveset is mostly just "lul no, fuck you" and I mean disrespecting with her moves on online was fun I guess, but over all this game really just needed more development time. And more server space evidently because I only experienced one lag free match and had one match completely die on me while playing online.

Cartoon Network Punchtime Explosion is by far the better game, even if its gameplay may not be as good. It has a fun story mode where all the characters you know and love act in character and interact with one another which is the point of a crossover, and it has a much larger roaster and even has weird terrible minigames during its story mode, like at least that game felt like it had some thought put into it.

This game, while it is fun to constantly deny the other player doing anything as Korra, sucks. There's nothing to do in it, you don't unlock any characters, you don't unlock any extra features that matter, literally the only reason this game exists is for the raw gameplay, which makes no sense considering this is a game that is a crossover of a bunch of beloved characters and Oblina, who gives a shit about the gameplay, I'm here for spongebob, but nothing "spongebob" happens in this game, there's some stages based on spongebob, spongebob and patrick and sandy are in the game, but there isn't anything spongebob about those elements, especially since there isn't cutscenes or unlockable conversations or some shit, listen man I just want to see the funny characters be funny.

Idk, I spent an hour and a half in this game and only as one character and I already feel like I got out of the game everything I'm gonna get out of it.

I keep telling my friends the funny joke that the only ps5 exclusive content I've experienced after owning one for half a year is FFVII Remake Intergrade, only to remember around roughly 30 minutes later each time that this game exists and that I bought and played it, which really goes to show how much of an impression it left on me.

Literally nothing made my heart sink more than when I switched to... Rivet? Is that her name? for the first time and her weapons and ammo were the exact same as Ratchet's was at the time. This game would have actually been good despite it's insanely boring story if only the two protagonists were different in any real and important way. Like, the fact they share one arsenal, first off, doesn't make any sense, and secondly, is probably the biggest missed opportunity in this whole series. It really did drain all my interest in the game immediately once I found that out. Usually games don't get ruined just by one mechanic or one design decision, but this one turned what was to begin with a mediocre Ratchet & Clank game into the worst one I've ever played.

Why even have two protagonists if you aren't gonna utilize it at all?

Also, within 5 minutes of gaining control, I got softlocked on the moving platform that takes you to the first battle of the game. Then, during the riding section, I keep going out of the intended play area and just had a blast trying to find the most glitchy piece of collision. This game feels so incredibly half-baked.

TearRing Saga: Berwick Saga: Lazberia Chronicles Chapter 174 is not only a fantastic name for a video game, but also one of the greatest examples of the greatest video game genre, the srpg. So total and utter in its execution to have momentum as a gameplay element in a genre that is often chided as "just chess, but if you found the rook hot." Not to be confused, of course, with the greatest example of the srpg as a genre, Banner Saga, where I DO indeed find the Rook attractive.

But this game has no need to have attractive characters, because it's all about the story. There's so much rng and diversity of strategy in this game that you'll be able to tell so many weird and wonderful stories with it, and really, that's all that matters when it comes to video games, or any art, really.

Breath of the Wild is a game of absolute extremes. It shows total understanding and mastery over the craft, but it also shows fundamental misunderstandings of them at the same time. It gives you so much and then tells you to put what it gave you aside. It is a struggle between game designs.

Zelda has always been a series of exploration. It has always known how to make you feel wanderlust even when you're exploring relatively linear worlds, but in most cases, that feeling was more aesthetic than actual, which is fine, of course, but Breath of the Wild sought to be able to give the most authentic sense of wanderlust a game can give someone. Now let's talk about how it goes about accomplishing that goal, the flow of the game, the gameplay loop.

In a word: contradictory. And not the fun kind. Self-sabotaging may be a better word for it, but Breath of the Wild portrays a very simple gameplay loop on its surface. You explore, you find something, you explore. But when that "something" is a shrine or dungeon, which it is most of the time, you run into issues. The biggest issue of Breath of the Wild. The dungeons, the second half to any Zelda equation, are horrid. There are 120 shrines dotted all around Hyrule and they usually hold one puzzle idea in each of them. Or they don't and you just have to fight something, or you just don't have to do anything, and the puzzle was getting to the shrine itself. This is awful and shows a basic misunderstanding of what dungeons do in Zelda games. Dungeons are never about a puzzle, it's about the puzzle of puzzles. Dungeons in Zelda are a collection of interlocking puzzles that in themselves form one puzzle. It is tedious and ruins game flow to be exploring the gorgeous open world only to be rewarded for that by being taken out of that open world into one of many homogeneous boring rooms to do a puzzle that is completely disconnected from everything else. What makes dungeons in Zelda so fantastic is how they work with the overworld. When I was going through Faron Woods in Skyward Sword, I was excited to see how this location's most pivotal point, its dungeon would be integrated with it, and Skyview Temple feels like something that I was exploring for. It feels like an ancient ruin deep in Faron Woods, it feels like part of the overworld. The shrines and even the divine beasts don't. They all look the same, and trust me, while it does look nice, seeing the same exact aesthetic over and over and over again with no major changes to it gets really grating when there's such a beautiful and diverse overworld I could be exploring instead. And when I overcome a shrine or a divine beast, I don't feel like I accomplished much. Instead of giving you an item half way through a dungeon, divine beasts give you control over one aspect of the beast once you get the map. This is so under developed and the dungeons aren't even that intricately designed that you ever need to use those controls in inventive or unique ways. And after you defeat the divine beast, instead of having a new tool that you could use to access more of the overworld like in most zelda games, you're given a spell that is either completely useless, barely noticeable, or a huge convenience that makes the other three spells look actively terrible in contrast. (I'm talking about Revali's Gale of course. In a game about exploration, the one spell that explicitly helps you do that is so obviously better than the two that are focused entirely on combat, and one that is just a recharging fairy.)

Oddly enough, these problems could be solved easily. Just have typical dungeon structure. Have around 9 dungeons sprinkled around the map and have them be traditional Zelda dungeons. When you first get to Lurelin village, have the locals tell you of the old abandoned temple that's on an island off the coast. Have a dilapidated old mine in Eldin where the Goron chieftain's father went to combat a great monster decades ago and never came back from, just anything that feels like it's part of the world and not some weird abstracted separate realm where nothing you do in it feels like you're exploring a part of the world you want to explore. They don't even need items in them or mini bosses or a map and compass like most Zelda games. Just a location in the world that feels like it fits where it is and isn't just home to the same reused assets over and over again. And have the puzzles have meaning. Have each puzzle in the dungeon come one step closer to unraveling the whole puzzlebox. I have no motivation to solve Breath of the Wild's puzzles. They mean nothing to me after I get my stamina maxed out, which is usually fairly early into the game for me, I might add. They don't mean anything if all they do is give you a heart piece. Heart pieces that have two loading screens you need to sit through in order to get it. They don't help unravel one big puzzle, they don't feel rewarding after you get all the useful stuff from them, and they all look the same and have no individual personality to them.

Now you may say that that's because the dungeons aren't meant to be as important as they were in previous Zelda games. I'd then ask why then they're absolutely everywhere. You can't go thirty minutes without finding one, and that's due to another of Breath of the Wild's contradictions.

I want to get lost in Hyrule. Nintendo wants me to get lost in Hyrule. It is then really annoying when they drag me out to make me climb a Ubisoft Tower. These towers are there to give you a mission when you enter a new region. They are huge, you can see it from all over the region it gives you the map of, which goes against the wanderlust of the rest of the exploration. When I wander, I want to wander. I don't want a giant glowing beacon to tell me that I need to get to it. This is baffling to me. Design wise it goes against exploration. You do not explore to find the Ubisoft Tower, you can see them from across the map. I think either you should fill out the map of where you've been, or there should be map merchants like in Majora's Mask wandering around Hyrule or at inns. They would then sell you a map, and the closer to where you currently are, the more expensive the map is. Or the map of each region should just be hidden somewhere in that region, and thorough exploration of the region would then be rewarded with the map. In a game about the whimsical mystique of exploring the worst thing you can do is give the players a map too early. And this leads us back to the shrines. The contradiction of Breath of the Wild I mentioned before that led to the shrines being absolutely everywhere is that they are your fast travel.

Having so many fast travel points in your game is baffling to me when the point of the game is to explore. It's saying that you don't think your world is good enough for people to want to see it a second time, which by the way isn't true. It's just another way this game's mechanics completely undermine its open world at times. You already have the stables, and they are all located in perfect locations to be your fast travel. Also I think fast travel should cost something. In a game where the main gameplay is exploring, getting to skip some of it should cost some currency. Which you can only make by exploring, so exploring, and exploring well, lets you skip some of it later down the line. I'm thinking carriages that take you to and from any stable in the game that is accessible at any stable.

But when this game lets you explore, it is breathtaking. I adore running through woods, stopping along the way to checkout a small cave, or a small abandoned shack in it. I love having to survive by hunting and gathering, I love having to constantly be scrounging up weapons, and I love when I discover something big. Be that a town or an old temple or a giant waterfall, it's all so masterfully crafted and truly does give me genuine wanderlust, it doesn't just imitate it. I love going to a stable, and hearing someone talk about a mythical horse roaming the nearby area, or have someone ask me to show them proof of the Great Fairy Fountain. But that's where the third part of the Zelda formula comes in. The sidequests.

Zelda games typically flesh out their world by having great sidequests. While most Zelda games don't have too many of them, they all have at least one quest in them that's remembered as one of the best in the series. Breath of the Wild has many sidequests. Many many more than Majora's mask even, which is THE sidequest Zelda game, but they're all so lackluster. There's no heart in most of them. This isn't helped by the game's equally lackluster cast. There is no Groose or Linebeck or Midna in this game. The closest is Sidon, who doesn't get enough screentime, and even then still can't match anyone from Skyward Sword. Or Majora's Mask. Or Twilight Princess. Or Windwaker. Or Link's Awakening. You get the picture.

The sidequests used to be what gave the overworld its life back in Ocarina of Time. When you first got to Kakariko in Ocarina of Time and saw cuccos running around and find their owner distraught over their escape it made the village feel like more than just seven polygonal houses and a windmill. It made it feel like people really lived in this village. Granted, those people never moved from their designated spots, but still.

Breath of the Wild doesn't need that. I don't need a sidequest for the game to tell me that people really live in Hateno Village, that's just self-evident from how they move around town and the town feels like it could really exist as a town, and not just an area for you to explore in a video game. But when I actually talk to people and do their sidequest and its all robotic and nobody feels like a real person, I am quickly reminded that I am not actually in a village with real people, but rather I am in an area that I'm supposed to explore because I'm playing a video game. Which wouldn't be so bad if that isn't what the game wants me to do, and likewise isn't what I want to have happen. Also like, the quests themselves aren't usually even that fun even if you are just treating it like a checklist item to do in a video game. Most of them just involve getting x number of items and giving it to the person that asked.

This game is very combat focused. Which is interesting, and the combat is very fun. The flow of it is basically the same as its been since Ocarina of Time, but with enemies that actually support the combat system like in Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. It's fun enough, but whenever I'd have to fight a lot in quick succession, I'd end up very tired of the combat. It works best when you've been exploring for a while and come across a group of enemies attacking a fellow traveler, or get ambushed by a yiga clan assassin, which is good because it means that it's a mechanic that actually positively flows into the games main mechanic of exploration.

Finally, I'd like to talk about the exploration. And only the exploration of this game. Ignore the things in the game that work against it and give it its proper due, because I am truly in awe of it. Breath of the Wild's world is one that I want to get lost in, I want to wander. I see so many different adventures in the distance and get excited to have them. I love stumbling upon a secret hidden treasure chest, I love that when I get lost I am rewarded. I am rewarded with treasure and beauty and the thrill of adventure. I love finding a town and buying new equipment at its shop and spending a night at its inn and then going on my way off to another adventure. I love gathering up local ingredients and sitting down to cook them all into what I think would be the best combination of dishes. I love seeing the destroyed world of Hyrule and the history it tells without any text boxes, it is truly a masterpiece.

Just not one that you get to experience to its fullest.