The history of Star Fox Adventures is well documented, especially considering a mostly playable build of Dinosaur Planet is easily accessible now, but to sum it up: Miyamoto took a look at this little action RPG Rare was making and suggested the lead character should be Fox McCloud. When the guy who told you to give DK a coconut gun has an opinion on what you should do with your game, you god damn listen, and so Rare threw out a bunch of key characters and changed plot points to accommodate the Star Fox crew. Ask some people and they'll tell you this is where everything went south, that Dinosaur Planet would have been a great game if not for all the Star Fox baggage.

To be fair, I kind of get this point. I think a lot of games with notoriously bad reputations made over one or two egregious flaws are dog piled on unnecessarily and are worthy of a reevaluation. Games like Dark Souls 2 and Shadow the Hedgehog have changed a lot in the public eye as people have come around on them years later. They were always great games, though. Classics, in fact. People just wouldn't give them a fair shot at the time. Star Fox Adventures is now 20 years old, so I knew exactly what it was going in, and considering I never played it back in the day, I figured I'd have a well-informed perspective that would allow me to see the game for exactly what it is and evaluate it accordingly.

This game sucks so much, holy shit.

I figured calling it a "Zelda clone" would actually be reductive, but honestly that's precisely what it is, and it is so in the most derogatory sense possible. Star Fox Adventures is to Ocarina of Time what Hydlide is to The Legend of Zelda. The puzzles in this game are so braindead easy that they just start to get dull and drag the game down, making it feel far longer than its length. You'll need to use spells Fox gains throughout the story in order to solve most of these, but they are often finicky and feel awful to use. You're also given some assistance from Prince Tricky, who I want to hold under water until the life leaves his eyes. A lot of Tricky's abilities could have been consolidated into Fox's moveset, allowing Rare to simplify the menu and streamline puzzles, but I guess they felt it was important to not have Fox experience the adventure alone and wanted to give him a sort of Navi equivalent. Developing a rare form of tinnitus where "hey, listen!" reverberates in my skull until I'm driven to madness would be preferable to Prince "I'm hungryyy" Tricky.

To be honest, for as lackluster and boring as a lot of this game is, it was probably a 2.5 for me until I got to Dragon Rock, a late game dungeon that makes frequent use of an early game ability: the Fire Shooter. This ability is exactly what it says on the tin, you activate it and can aim your staff around to shoot little fire balls. The problem is that the game forces your reticle back to the center of the screen if you're not forcing the analog stick where you want it, meaning you're constantly fighting against the controller to line up your shots. This thing swings around wildly at the slightest input, too, so it's also easy to overshoot your targets. The vast majority of Dragon Rock's puzzles are based around this one skill, with many of them being timer based as well. I know third person aiming in video games was in an altogether different place than it is now, but it's astonishing to me this made it into the finished product. Maybe they didn't have time to fix it because they were too busy figuring out how the hell to fit Andross into this thing, I don't know!

Dungeons are broken up with short flying segments modeled after Star Fox 64, but it's clear that Rare had neither the passion nor skill to create a proper Star Fox game. They just feel lazily thrown together with all the elements you'd expect from a typical Star Fox level, but without any of the nuance or design sense. Similar to how Star Fox Adventures feels like a flat version of Zelda, so too does it feel like a flat version of Star Fox. Completely uninspired from top to bottom.

The story is of course the most involved narrative in any Star Fox game to this point, but it's also very clear what parts were in the original Dinosaur Planet and what parts were shoehorned in at the request of Miyamoto. Even the way Fox is written feels distinctly out of character for him, and it's not like there was a whole lot of content out there to properly define who he was prior to that point. I haven't played Dinosaur Planet so I suppose I can't say with any authority, but Fox is written in such a way that it wouldn't surprise me if they simply swapped the lead character's model, rewrote maybe 10% of his lines to reference his crew, and called it a day.

General Scales and Krystal also seem like casualties of Rare retooling the game. Scales is the main antagonist, but he very rarely shows up and a lot of his evil deeds are told to you by other characters. In fact, he doesn't even get a boss fight at the end of the game, being done away with unceremoniously in order to move you right along into a battle with Andross. Krystal is also a total non-character, which I found a little more surprising given people's uh... fascination with her. She shows up in the prologue and is then reduced to a damsel in distress for the rest of the game. You're never given any context about who she is or why she's important, she's just a piece of meat stuck in a crystal, and to punctuate this point the first time Fox sees her you're treated to music that sounds like it's ripped straight from a 1970s adult film. It's ridiculous. When this theme shows up again during the end credits I laughed until it hurt.

Star Fox Adventures is rarely bad in a way that's actually interesting, and frankly I think it's irresponsible to not put an FDA warning on the box about its sedative nature. Sure, it suffers from the needless inclusion of Fox McCloud and his idiot friends, but it was never a good game to begin with. It controls poorly, puzzles are either uninteresting or just plain unfun, and the only real identity its able to create is owed entirely to the elements that were never meant to be there to begin with. I think a lot of games with notoriously bad reputations made over one or two egregious flaws are worthy of a reevaluation, and my evaluation is this game sucks ass.

Pikmin 4 is fine.

It isn’t often that I get actively excited for video game releases, considering that my “backlog” of games is at the time of my writing this sitting at well over two thousand games I could try out at any time. I’m in no rush to play the newest stuff that comes out when I haven’t even finished Bloodborne, Mother 3, or even started Disco Elysium yet. I was actually excited for Pikmin 4 though. I preordered it and everything. I don’t even buy games usually, but this one I wanted to dedicate time to right away. Pikmin is one of my favorite game series ever. It’s a little rough around the edges, but I consider Pikmin 2 to be one of my favorite video games of all time. Pikmin 4 is fun. Good, even. But for me, it doesn’t touch Pikmin 2.

Pikmin 4 actually makes me feel the way that I’ve seen some diehard Pikmin 1 fans talk about Pikmin 2, with its lack of any sense of real pressure and focus on free exploration. On one hand, I agree that it takes away from the uniquely isolating, anxious, and unfamiliar mood carefully crafted for the first entry. On the other hand, Pikmin 2 was my first Pikmin game and I greatly valued the lack of pressure that allowed me to learn the ins and outs of it when I was an overly-cautious child. I’m pretty sure it took me 60 days or something the first time I finished it, and now that I’m an adult I can fairly consistently clear it in a couple of in-game weeks. I originally raised an eyebrow when first reading the question of “why bother with the day-night cycle at all if there’s no limit of days” regarding 2, but now I feel myself asking the exact same question with 4.

The actual answer is to create a stronger atmosphere and sense of environment, which Pikmin 4 nails (for the most part). The fact that you need to plan out your day and get work done during daylight, lest you face the wrath of wild night creatures, does wonders for building this sense of mystery and fear about the world you’re exploring. But this connects directly to what I feel to be the single biggest issue with the game: a profound failure of tension building or real danger. What we have here is an incredibly beautiful and vast landscape full of wonder and beauty set in front of us, begging to be explored after ten years of waiting for a new Pikmin game, full of treasures, caves, and enemies recognizable from the first three games.

And this dopey yellow shithead and his crew cheapen the entire experience.

Also the night missions are stupid and dumb contextually because they break the Pikmin story rule about nighttime being too dangerous to explore and ruin immersion by being actually pretty reasonable to handle. The game mode itself is fun enough though, Pikmin Tower Defense is a nice idea. I have nothing else to say about that.

Back to the dog.

With the introduction of the rescue pup Oatchi, levels are now designed with his abilities in-mind, like jumping, traveling through tunnels, and being able to carry Pikmin on his back while traversing through water, an obstacle previously reserved to blue Pikmin exclusively. He also doubles as a second captain who can command and lead Pikmin, just like the player character. You’re given the option (repeatedly encouraged) to give your pup various upgrades to make him stronger, whether it be to deal more damage, carry heavier objects, swim faster, etc., which obviously makes the game easier. However, riding on Oatchi’s back with your Pikmin entirely removes a key weakness of your ant-carrot army of the previous games:

Your hurtbox has now been concentrated to the back of a responsive and easily-maneuverable puppy dog.

I’m torn on this mechanically. On one hand, by the nature of all of your Pikmin being focused on a single spot, you now risk losing a greater number of Pikmin at once to single strikes. I know this because a boss creature stepped on me and Oatchi and I lost most of my troops. No, I don’t want to talk about it.

On the other hand, due to the way Oatchi’s tackle ability works, taking down most of the larger, higher-health enemies is now a linear experience. You hop on Oatchi’s back with your Pikmin, you charge your tackle, you land the tackle, your Pikmin hop off of Oatchi and onto the enemy, the enemy’s health depletes almost instantly.

A game doesn’t have to conform to the rules of any particular genre, but taking an engaging element of strategy out of a “Real-Time Strategy” game rubs me the wrong way.

I don’t actually hate the Oatchi-specific puzzles that come up on occasion. I like the little fella’s design. I think he’s goofy, especially when he makes the little whwhwhwhwhwhw noise with his whistle. But my problems with him get emphasized specifically in the context of the Engulfed Castle.

The Engulfed Castle is, in short, an excellent reference to the Submerged Castle from Pikmin 2, what I feel to be the most memorable and interesting cave in that game. It’s the only cave with a distinct restriction on the type of Pikmin you’re allowed to bring with you, as it is completely surrounded by water. A rule of Pikmin 2 is that you’re only able to enter a cave with the Pikmin directly in your squad, which means you can only bring blue Pikmin into this cave. The Engulfed Castle of Pikmin 4 is surrounded by water as well, but Pikmin 4 does not have this restriction on caves, so Nintendo decided to circumvent this by simply not allowing you to bring any other Pikmin type into the cave when selecting which Pikmin to join you. This cave functions just like any other, with long dark passages for you to explore and collect treasure, except your squad doesn’t have resistance to hazardous elements like fire, poison, and electricity. This means that you need to tread carefully in navigating obstacles to defeat enemies and get to the treasure. However, after about 5 minutes have passed on a sublevel, this steamroller-lookin’-guy shows up and starts meandering around the place, squishing everything in its way. Your blue Pikmin cannot hurt it.

The danger of the Waterwraith comes from the task of needing to carefully bring treasure back to your base coupled with how large, slow, and vulnerable your army is when spread out.

Oatchi lets your squad avoid the Waterwraith completely by carrying you and your Pikmin on its back.

You can just walk right past it. What’s it going to do? Turn slightly to the right? I’m already at the exit with all the treasure collected, you Flubber-lookin’ freak.

In Oatchi’s defense, it’s not entirely his fault. Nintendo also made Pikmin faster, so there’s not really any risk of them being left behind if you call them with your whistle (which is also the best it’s ever been) and try to make a break for it.

I will give Nintendo credit though, because they replicated the layout of the original sublevel floors from Pikmin 2. That was a very cool thing to realize while I was comfortably walking away from the steamroller.

Additionally, Pikmin 4 is so extraordinarily liberal in the sheer number of resources it gives you that I actively stopped giving a shit about Pikmin deaths. This is coming from someone who would hit restart on my GameCube every time a Pikmin died on my first playthrough of Pikmin 2. I’m sitting here with unused bombs, electricity, mines, and 56 Ultra-Spicy Sprays that I don’t even remember getting, and the game has the audacity to remind me that I can always rewind the clock if I feel bad about losing a single Pikmin. Relax, game. I have 400 other ice Pikmin sitting in reserve. It’s gonna be fine.

Granted, Pikmin 3 offered this via day-selection, but it wasn’t in-your-face about it the way in which 4 does it.

I don’t think a game being easier is necessarily a bad thing, but it feels a little wack to me when it’s a Pikmin game specifically, especially the way it was done with this one. I don’t need a bunch of items to figure out how to clear a level. My amorphous controllable blob of little guys can handle this.

Now, I need to address the Rescue Corp. itself. I don’t mind a world of characters that talk and have personalities. Hell, EarthBound is my favorite video game ever because of exactly this. However, what I do mind is a world that doesn’t know how to shut the fuck up.

These characters do not allow for any sense of mystery or wonder while it happens to you, the player, directly. “It sure is good we have the Pikmin with us!” No shit, we’re like three inches tall. You don’t need to have a message pop up that says “wow golly gosh gee you sure just lost 30 Pikmin to a rock-spider death explosion, it sure would be great to rewind time right about now” because you’re fucking experiencing it right there right in front of you. You’re having fun and making video game memories, and Collin or Shepherd has the audacity to say “this thing is happening and you need to do this right now immediately” like I didn’t learn to blow the whistle when my Pikmin were on fire FIFTEEN YEARS AGO.

Why is the game backseat-gaming? Give me the fucking wheel and let me experience the consequences of my actions. For fuck’s sake.

It can be helpful on extremely rare occasions to have some kind of popup notification about something happening off-screen, given the nature of an RTS game, especially for new players. But as someone who figured out fairly quickly to actively pay attention to and notice the only numbers on your screen available at all times worth monitoring (Pikmin population), being told that my squad I sent on a faraway mission is under attack actively spoils the surprise. With Nintendo offering no option to reduce the frequency or turn it off completely, they might as well just said “fuck you” to me personally instead.

The only surprise to be found here is in my own consistent expectations of Nintendo.

Speaking of lacking any sense of mystery and wonder, a mechanic I was surprisingly very excited for in this entry was actually a limitation; you are only allowed to have three types of Pikmin out on the field or in a cave at any given time. This had the potential to be cool in-concept, because it could have meant you’d need to pick and choose different Pikmin types for different needs throughout various obstacles you encounter throughout your time spent in different huge locations.

Nope. The game YET AGAIN removes any player responsibility for decision-making. Just press the X button. The game will give you recommended types. You’ll be fine. No thoughts required. Go grab yourself a snack.

Can’t quite hit that one creature? Lock-on button. Charge. With Oatchi. It’s probably dead now.

Great.

The lock-on feature is awful and I hate it. I’ll take the free-form movement of an entire army controlled by the right stick and the ability to aim freely over an auto-snapping lock-on and charge button any day.

Biggs_hoson comments in their review that Pikmin 4 feels like “just playing more Pikmin™”, and when it boils down to it, I think that’s ultimately my biggest problem with the game. It’s still “Pikmin™”, but in a lot of ways it’s been homogenized to taste a little more like your average video game and less like the Weirdo Shit™ I’d fallen in love with through the first two games; games I find myself gravitating more and more towards as I play more video games.

Nintendo took the formula from their previous games, created an interesting world to explore and appreciate, and then slapped all of the tools they possibly could together to make it conducive to blazing through said world as fast as you possibly can.

My body is a machine that turns unexplored natural habitats into Platinum-Medal Cleared Dandori Challenges™.

I’m conflicted, because the first two Pikmin games are pretty niche and I understand completely why Nintendo would make the choices they did with 4. Pikmin 1 was ambitious and weird, and I respect it tremendously, significantly more than I actually enjoy playing it, which could be argued is the entire point of it. Pikmin 2 is my perfect jank-sandwich full of bullshit and weird eccentricities, and one of the few games I’ve given genuine thought about speedrunning. Pikmin 3 simplified the controls and toned down the difficulty in order to make it more approachable, shifting focus to a Pikmin 1-esque gameplay style of “do things as efficiently and quickly as possible,” all at the expense of making it an overall more shallow experience, and Pikmin 4 went further by tuning up the “dandori” focus and then adding a thousand safety nets. There are challenges in the later part of the game to be sure, but the ones requiring actual honest-to-goodness creative thinking are few and far-between. I’ve been seeing a lot of people saying it “takes elements from all of the other ones to make it the best one” and I just don’t see it. It’s the most sterilized and homogenized in the series for sure.

It’s still a good game overall though. After how short Pikmin 3 felt back on the WiiU, I welcome the clever design tricks Nintendo used to pad out the Story Mode and make it longer, e.g. Pikmin 3’s Mission Mode now existing in the form of mini-caves where you rescue leaflings by completing a Dandori Challenge. I feel it to be way too hand-holdy for my tastes, but I want to stress more than anything that I still like this game and I feel it to be an overall strong entry in the series. The time I’ve been putting aside to play Pikmin 4 has been enjoyable, and I’m incredibly happy for the reception it’s getting, as Pikmin is a series that absolutely deserves it. The levels are great, the controls are great, the caves are great, and the overall design of the game itself is fun and works well. But it’s too sleepy for what I was hoping for.

You’re not gonna get unexpectedly carpet-bombed or jumpscared by a Bulbear just for carrying a rubber ducky out of a cave. In my eyes, for some reason, this is a negative.

In the end, I guess I just wish Nintendo would say “fuck you” to me through its level design instead of its endless tutorials.

Just give me a “silent Collin” mode and let me explore the wilderness in peace.

I bet I’d feel differently about all this if this was my first Pikmin game.

It’s not.

Absolute amateur hour, a cascade of incomprehensible decisions. Shamelessly begs to be treated as a game of scope and impact while taking the easy way out of every mechanical (eh, just give the hero an all-target instadeath spell with 100% accuracy in case they get tired of pressing Free Will), systemic (the sheer joy of maneuvering this interface to manage items between 70+ characters...), and narrative (it's all the evil witch's fault!!) challenge. Konami, hardly a company known for developing RPGs, was seeing nothing but dollar signs when they demanded an 108-character roster from novice designer Murayama, a hearty stable of show ponies for a grand first step into a brave new console generation. Saddest of all is how little the company learned from the experience and how few substantive improvements were made to Suikoden 2, a game that does barely anything to actually improve its predecessor's play experience but enjoys a rich reputation based solely on a new coat of aesthetic polish. It cannot be overstated how hard Konami Kukeiha Club carries this.

I do grant it some positive tilt because this game is the training ground for the franchise's sense of humor, which is one of its most appealing parts to me. From time to time here they lean too hard into it, almost to the point of being callous, but sometimes you've just gotta learn the hard way not to use the banjo.

Twenty years of cheating at chinchirorin and counting 😘

## what i played

i spent 75 hours doing maaaybe half the shrines, a handful of side quests, upgrading my armor most of the way, and beating the final boss

### stuff i liked

- the art direction
- the music near the end of the game is incredible
- lots of cool shrine puzzles
- link is once again a hot little elf twink on display for us
- the sky islands were pretty cool
- the enemy design is so cool looking
- i just want to play a game about bokoblins thanks

### stuff i was meh about

- the framerate got really choppy whenever you do physics stuff, but was playable for most things
- the overall soundtrack direction is too subdued and ambient for my tastes
- frankly i'm not huge on the combat in BOTW/TOTK. the side dodge vs back dodge vs parry mechanics is way too much for me. dark souls doesn't even need this many types of parries. i never bothered mastering or even getting half good at this.
- only 5 full dungeons
- none of the boss fights were very fun to me
- why are horses still so useless?
- zelda has always had side quests but i think the structure of putting map markers everywhere and making lists of side quests and all that makes the game commodified in a way that feels uncomfy to me, and pressures me into doing more tedious shit than i would naturally
- the structure of the whole game is basically 100% flat, like BOTW
- everything is approximately the same difficulty with only minimal scaling
- because of this, dungeons can't really build on previous ones
- and you don't collect new and interesting upgrades over the course of the game
- i didnt really find building stuff as compelling as they must've expected
- on occasion i was like "oh shit!" but it was rare
- usually it was just tedious and boring
- due to the finicky physics and weird abilities, lots of puzzles can be cheesed, and it may not even be remotely clear what the intended solution is... leading to a dissatisfied feeling of cheating the game and/or yourself
- i feel like older zelda games had more unique types of enemies?
- most enemies here are just recolors
- it was tough to manage all 5 companions since they're 100% context sensitive actions :(

### stuff i didnt like

- feels too "epic" for zelda imo, which i associate with being a bit more cutesy and subdued
- too many cutscenes
- dialogue for almost every character is far too long
- shonen anime tropes really undercut the zelda mood for me
- the underground area was a huge bummer for me, and i chose not to fully explore it
- dungeon design is once again lacking. the dungeons are basically completely flat in structure: just do 4-5 puzzles in any order. also it's possible to cheese some of the puzzles via environment traversal. eek.
- the pacing of the final stretch of the game is all out of wack
- mech combat is a huge bummer
- "gloom" sucked because it punishes you for exploring and for not stockpiling certain types of cures
- and it makes you want to just run away from every battle involving it

## verdict

i would've had a lot more fun just loading up a classic 2d zelda and replaying it

Iwata’s dead, Shiggy’s checked out, and there’s no one to tell Aonuma no.

What the fuck is this.

I really shouldn’t be surprised, but I still am. This is the same game. It's the same people who made Breath of the Wild. I loved the first game, but still didn’t pay attention to the hype cycle of this one at all. I guess all the paraphernaleous cultural impact still seeped in somehow.

Remember when people thought there’d be playable Zelda? Fucking lol.

This review is only based on the five (5!) hours it took to get the paraglider, and I gotta say, it only kept making me appreciate the Great Plateau in Breath of the Wild more. The thematic cohesion. The mystery. The framing of how that whole game was going to work in miniature. What my abilities would be, what my relationship to game information would be like, what kinds of emotions I could expect to experience playing that game.

Maybe Tears of the Kingdom is a fine game. Maybe it is every bit as fun to exist in as Breath of the Wild, in theory. But in practice, it won’t be, can’t be. It didn’t start in the wilderness, letting me discover its game essence on my own terms. It started with a prestige-game walking-sim lore dump. A lore dump that ended with a bunch of Hot Anime Nonsense™.

Zelda and Link confronting mummy Ganon was like walking into the mid-season finale of a show that’s already on its second or third season. Except I’ve already played the previous season, and that context did not help me at all! Ganon’s no longer a miasma, but a dude with a voice? And there’s a goat dragon that’s Zelda’s great-great-grand-furry? And the Master Sword’s just useless?

Here’s my beef. All of this is great for trailers and generating “hype” because “hype” is fueled on speculation and curiosity. But the elements that generate hype are not the same as the elements that fuel a sincere emotional connection with a character, story, or world. I’m frustrated because Breath of the Wild knew this so well.

The old man on the Great Plateau was mysterious, but allowed to be goofy. He was generous, but mischievous. You could see him in different contexts, learn about him by exploring his house when he wasn’t around. There was a fun little emotional connection built up by being around him. The twist of his true identity, and the further twist of his ultimate fate, made me feel little pings of emotion. Nothing fancy, but he was the tutorial NPC. He primed me to think, “Oh, this is a game and a game world where it’ll be fun to get invested in people.” And he was the perfect segway into telling me what my mission was, what the stakes were, and why I, the player, should care.

The goat dragon great-great-grand-furry is none of this. We know he’s dead when we first meet him. His dialog makes no sense. There are a ton of slave robots on his little island that he comments with surprise are still running. Did he not program them? Can he not de-program them? Am I supposed to feel something about how he made a race of robot slaves? Are they sentient? I would have rather had signs in the ground Super Mario Style telling me all the tutorial things I needed to know. Because it feels weird for a robot to jovially say “Hey, there are some robots that’ll try to kill you, so, like, don’t feel bad about killing them. Here are some combat tips for killing them!”

And then his sequence at the end of his tutorial level practically screamed to me, “Hey, remember when you felt something at the end of your time with the Old Man in Breath of the Wild? We’re doing the same thing here! Don’t you feel something? Don’t you remember loving that?” And like yeah, I do remember that. And now I’m mad you’re trying to copy your own damn homework without understanding why it worked the first time. I have not built up a relationship with great-great-grand-furry goat dragon. I do not know why he is chill with Zelda. Honestly, all the statues with him and Zelda holding hands at the end of every shrine is weirding me out! Is Link a cuck now?

I want to say this is all superficial, but it’s really not, because everything about my time with Tears of the Kingdom so far felt like it was being led around by the tail. This is a re-skin of Breath of the Wild, but it doesn’t even have the decency to be honest with me. If we’re gonna have shrines, and they’re gonna function exactly the same way, why did you go through the bother of giving them new, thematically incoherent designs. Why do the upgrade orbs need new names, new lore. Changing the shrines’ glowy color from blue/orange to green is a downgrade, actually! Those other colors were a lot easier to see at a distance in a game world that has lots of green!

Jumping ahead of myself for a moment, I knew I was done when I unlocked the first new Shiekah Tower. (You can’t even call them Sheikah Towers anymore, these days!) The emergence of the Sheikah Towers in Breath of the Wild was iconic, cinematic, promising adventure in a changing world. The equivalent cutscene in Tears of the Kingdom felt like getting a homework assignment. Hey, someone you know has already explored the world, had time to build fantastic structures in every corner, and just needs a cable guy to come by and make sure the wiring is up to code! You know, that person who was a 100-year old loli in the last game! Well, now she’s been aged up to guilt-free fuckable waifu status! And she’s super plot relevant! You’ll get to talk to her more than Zelda over the course of the game, probably!

Seriously, that loli was my least favorite part of Breath of the Wild, and Tears of the Kingdom felt it important to put her loli portrait on her encyclopedia page?? When she will never look like that in this game??? She has the gall to rename Zelda’s magic iPad after herself! I was thinking about her (and taking internal bets as to whether she’d be a waifu or had somehow de-aged even more) hours before I saw her.

ANYWAY. None of what I said so far really matters more than the gameplay. And a Great Plateau 2 this was not.

I was so disappointed with how linear this was. In theory, I understand the concept that led to it existing the way it does. Tears of the Kingdom is a Lego game. It purposefully had sections of little Lego kits structured in a way where pieces from one would not mix with pieces of another and confuse people who have never touched Legos before. But giving kids Lego kits can change the way they interact with Legos. Hell, I remember I thought it was sacrilege when my sisters disassembled my Bionicle to make their own Voltron-esque monstrosities. But to them, who had not, could not, would not read the instructions, their style of play was more intuitive, more pure than mine.

Fundamentally, Tears of the Kingdom was not encouraging me to think for myself, to become resourceful, to seek my own path through things. It was priming me to expect that for any task that needed to be accomplished, the tools and materials would be provided for me. And without the spark of original creativity, putting the Lego pieces together was the dull monotony of fulfilling someone else’s factory work blueprint.

When I saw the jumble of lumber next to a korok in an adorable backpack, I immediately mentally put together what needed to be done, and thought, “What kind of Nintendo Labo bullshit is this?” The tediousness of rotating wood, sticking it to a hook, waiting for the korok to go down the slide - this was minutes of gameplay execution from the seconds of intuition I had of what the game wanted from me. And the reward was a measly two gold turds. I felt like I deserved five.

I feel like Aonuma has gone off the deep end. He’s spent so long in this game engine that he’s forgotten what made the original Breath of the Wild experience so special. He’s made a game for speedrunners without designing a game for the common folk first. In Breath of the Wild, the myriad systems, the freedom of choice, the hidden depth of the game’s chemistry and physics mechanics - all of those were introduced slowly in juxtaposition to a Link who had nothing but a shirt and a stick to his name. Everything felt special because the game beat you down and dead early on to make you appreciate and critically examine anything that could provide the slightest advantage to survival.

In Tears of the Kingdom, you gain the ability to Ascend through ceilings, (without stamina cost!!!), before you get the option to increase your stamina. Before you have even found anywhere worth climbing, any heights out of reach. There is nothing to instill that feeling of “I can’t climb there now, but some day, I will!” This is so wild to me. That emotion will never blossom when you’re given a cheat code at Level 1. It will cause people to look for places they can exploit their cheat code instead of… engaging with what was the entire foundation of the freedom of exploration in the first game!

Cannot overstate how much I felt something thematically crack inside of me when Tears of the Kingdom did not even suggest the possibility that I could upgrade my stamina wheel with my first blessing, locking me into more health. For a cutscene.

For a god-awful cutscene where Zelda fucks off before we chase down some NPCs to chase down some other NPCs to watch her fuck off again.

Does this all sound nit-picky? Do I sound insane? I sound petty to myself! But I have to be honest, this game failed to ignite my curiosity! And I gave Breath of the Wild 5 stars! It really does make me wonder how much of a game experience is built on the expectations built by its opening hours. In a way, if the only difference between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is the introduction and framing, that would be a valuable lesson on how important those beginning elements are.

I know that’s not the only difference. Tears of the Kingdom is anime as fuck. It’s tacky as hell. I lost it when Zelda’s magic iPad made the real-world iPad camera shutter sound.

Tears of the Kingdom is not a new game. It’s a jerry-rigged retrofitting of an existing game by an old man who saw Fortnite once since 2017, approved by a company who has no idea what he’s doing or why the old game sold so many millions of copies. Of course they’d be up for a direct sequel asset reuse that sounded vaguely like Minecraft! I’m just disappointed that the same team who showed they were capable of creating such a fully realized thematic throughline of a game were content to corrupt something beautiful just for the sake of convenience.

Maybe Link’s awful haircut and corrupted hand are a perfect visual metaphor for this game’s soul. A bunch of concepts grafted onto something great with no regard for how inelegantly they clash, while also showing a lack of maintenance to keep what came before presentable.

I’m so glad I didn’t pay $70 ($70!) for this game, or else I would have felt obligated to stick around long enough to understand the gacha mechanics enough to get mad at them.

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June 28th 2023 Edit: wish different reviews could have different play statuses. Oh well. “Completed” the game with more words,, but in my heart this review should stay Abandoned.

Intelligent systems, is this a bit?

As soon as it was announced Engage is a game that was raising a bunch of red flags. Nostalgia baiting, the awful focus on a myunit, gimmicky new mechanics and fucking GACHA? The whole thing really looked like intelligent systems giving into the worst tendancies of post-awakening Fire Emblem.

And y'know, if that was it, i'd probably be at least fine with that. Fates, even revelations, one of the dumbest fucking things i've ever played, are all still at the very least, compelling. I have like 100 hours in Fates, embarassing as that is, because the Fire Emblem formula is still pretty great, conquest has like 5 good maps and the bad stuff is mostly ignorable. I have played fucking Gaiden to completion even after Echoes was out just to see what was up.

With engage ive got 15 hours in it and I can barely stomach a moment more. I want to keep going because I love FE. But I absolutely cannot stand this game.

Yes, like Fates, Engage is a game that falls prey to IS' stupid tendancies. But the real sin with Engage is that what has been cribbed about just does not gel together at all.

Main issue is bloat, on a gameplay level. Part of the genius of Fire Emblem is how really quite simple it all is, and how limited the resources and options really all are. The best section of the entire franchise, and it's not even close, is Thracia 776's Munster arc, a section which truly relies on you making the most of an incredibly limited toolset and pushing it as far as you can against overwhelming odds. Of course, over the years the complexity inevitably increased, to mixed but often positive results. Engage firmly goes too far though.

The big problem is the mixing of the social sim stuff from 3 houses whilst also incorporating its new stuff with the engage system and so on. Being able to boost stats and stuff in a hub was questionable but mosty worked in 3H, a game structured around it. In Engage all the stat boosting, friendship boosting, animal handling(why), minigames (WHY) are mindnumbing roadblocks to the fun strategy. These sorts of things have never really sat right in FE, where the ways damage formulas and speed formulas in particular work make tiny stat boosts often have huge implications, but this goes way too far in a game system very unsuited to it. It essentially stretches the preperations stage, already too long in most FEs, to being the majority of the game. It's unnaceptable.

And it's a real shame as a lot of the changes in the gameplay department are actually really good. Map design is probably the best it's been since radiant dawn, unit balance doesnt seem so overfocused on a small amount of strong units, bosses actually move about and honestly the engage system, regardless of it being insulting to the original characters and whatever, is a pretty neat gimmick honestly. It's a way more balanced version of pair up that gives effectively more burst damage and interesting techniques, which combined with enemies being generally stronger than previous games makes for an interesing loop. Obviously, its in this game so the execution is flubbed - the rings being limited in number kinda undoes the balance improvements on its own, and the skill inheritance, bonding, and gacha ring stuff is yet more pointless fluff to waste your damn time.

If the game just had the engage system over lets say, Radiance series levels of prep and other stuff going on, the gameplay could have been great, probably the best the series had seen in over a decade. But there's way too much going on to waste your time and it does not gel together.

The story and characters are so bafflingly bad I don't know who it's even for. As ludicrously bad as fates' are, at least it's very easy to pinpoint what's going for - the sheer power trip of being infalliable corrin, the stupid golden route both sides-ing and being able to have children with your big booba wyvern riding sister. Engage's is less bad in the "IS is down bad" regard, but it's worse in that it just completely forgets to have anything at all. It's completely hookless, the world and characters feel like they've got nothing going on at all, and it all feels very rote. The mystical/dragon elements feel tappen onto a pretty normal fire emblem plot and all they do is make the MC less personable and relatable. FE has only really had a good story in like 4 games, but it's structure as a series has always made it very easy to connect to characters and it has never dropped the ball this hard, and it's not like it's even trying something.

The whole game is just a confused mess, and doesnt even seem to be sure of who it's appeal is for. It's nostalgia bait to an extreme whilst barely resembling the simple, down to earth nature of those games. It goes for a simpler structure, dropping choice and most of the social sim elements (which people quite liked even if they're not entirely my bag), but keeps just enough of them to be really annoying. Characters are less of a focus for some reason? Romance is less of a thing? I can't even tell who this game is for because it feels like it consciously does something to alienate a fan of every game in the series, and it certaintly isnt for new players. Even as a "we needed 20 more characters to eventually put in heroes" joint it's a complete failure.

I hesitate to say this is the worst FE - Revelations is truly awful - but even Fates had like, an idea of what it was going for, as bad as what that is and as bad as it's execution is. Engage is aimless and awful and for the first time ever, it's easy for me to put an FE down.

this is a tedious, often infuriating experience with an appreciated art style and inconsistent spikes of good humour.

everything in the game is 2-3x longer than it should be; interesting and varied objectives aren’t interesting or varied when you’re asked to complete them three times in a row with little differentiating the first from the last - all the while the camera is unhelpful at best, the platforming is inconsistent, the combat is mostly lazy. the environments that you explore each chapter seem to be created by a team saying “this is a well designed and attractive area, how do we make it an absolute living nightmare to traverse?”. the cutscenes and dialogue are mostly exposition dumps and some of the mission objectives are wildly unclear.

this sounds overly negative, and it is, but only because there is a VERY good sequel in an easily trimmed down version of the content that is here. the first game is a fun and tight 6-7 hour experience, this is at least 15 hours and feels like the longest game ever made when you can see the progress % going up by a single percent after each mission - I was questioning things at 25%, bored by 50% and almost shelved it at 75%. this is a bloated misstep and killed any interest in me playing Sly 3.