My favourite thing about the fifth generation of Pokemon is that it has an entirely new and strong Pokedex with all unique Pokemon. This feels like such a gamble for the series but it absolutely paid off, I love using only new Pokemon in my team whenever I play a new Pokemon game but it's not always easy to find a good variety with the few new Pokemon added, but an entirely new Pokedex allows you to experiment with the wide range of new Pokemon without falling back on the ones you're already comfortable with from the previous generations. Honestly, I can't believe they haven't done this since Black & White, I would love to see another game take this approach.

The story was great and the different areas were really cool, I often find certain areas a bit of a drag in Pokemon games but I was hooked throughout my entire playthrough of Pokemon Black, I found myself interacting with every single NPC I came across which I normally don't have the patience for.

If you're a Pokemon fan and haven't played this yet, I 100% recommend you to do so, it's a must-play for me.

Despite my love for the base game, I struggled with this expansion. The story is one of the few things I enjoyed about it, it's relatively generic overall but it's centred around Melia who was my favourite character in the base game so I enjoyed it a lot for that reason. As for the gameplay, while it's almost identical to the base game, they removed chain attacks for some reason which was one of the most fun parts of Xenoblade's combat system for me. The new characters are two Nopon who are gameplay-wise identical to Reyn and Sharla. I found them fun at first but the novelty wore off fast and by the end, I just found them annoying. Finally, the last boss was one of the most frustrating bosses I've ever fought. I genuinely considered giving up because of how much I hated that fight but I remember casual mode exists; I'm not the type to lower the difficulty for the sake of a boss in games, I usually have too much pride for that, but I really didn't care with this boss and was just glad it was over.

I'd only recommend this expansion for the story, it's worth it for the Melia content but not much else outside of that.

2D Shadow of the Colossus. I really enjoy games like this that essentially strip the fat off and say ok the fun part of the video game are the bosses so thats all we're giving you. A lot of the challenge of these games is usually either trying to puzzle out the bosses weakness or being good enough at the game to defeat them, but this game does a fantastic job of combining them with having your arrow one shot every boss with very strict timing windows and having to figure out how to get them to expose their weak point in the first place.