Nothing quite beats the feeling of long-jumping off a little planetoid and seeing Mario orbit around it as gravity slowly pulled him in. It's a small thing, but I had never experienced something like that in video games and Mario Galaxy is full of moments like it. This game was a joy and I still think back on it fondly. One of the most original and delightfully innovative 3D platformers I've ever played. I loved it so much that I even 100%'d it which involved playing through the entire game a second time as Luigi.

Tchia wears its influence on its sleeve but unfortunately, it does not do anything interesting with it. The main mechanic of possessing animals or objects seems cool at first but there isn't much to it. Throwing possessed objects is pretty fun for a time. It builds its world to be explored based upon your curiosity of what you can see. Not marking your location on the map was an attempt to encourage this exploration which I appreciate but it didn't work well. I mostly just marked everything on the map and then just follow the compass. The activities you find aren't particularly fun and of all the games to have enemy camps to clear out, this shouldn't have been one. I don't want to to be too hard on the game since it was clearly made with passion and features a setting we rarely if ever see in video games. It just didn't work for me.

I feel like Void Strangers releasing earlier this year really spoiled me and I'll never see puzzle games the same way going forward. I do not see why this game is getting so much praise. I don't really know how to say this without sounding like a jackass but I do not understand how this is being called the smartest and best puzzle game of the year when there are NO puzzles. I did not think about my actions ONCE. You move from point A to point B grabbing orbs and using interactables and I felt like I had no agency in the solutions; they were just right in front of me. The art and music are both top notch, creating a tremendous sense of mystery and awe which makes the tedium and banality of the gameplay only sting more. Like I guess if you just want to get blitzed and vibe and sink into the couch and see cool shit as sweeping synth pads wash over you without having to do much, you'll really have a good time? But otherwise I think it's just 3 hours better spent doing anything else.

If there's ever a Pikmin game you should play in your life, it should be the one. If not this one, then Pikmin 3 Deluxe, but 4 is the best entry into the series so far.

It's a beautiful, gorgeous game with bizzare yet charming enemy and character designs and a lovely atmosphere. It's a satisfying, multi-tasking game where you have to juggle various tasks before time runs out each day. It doesn't sound fun, but it is, and trying to optimize how you go about your in-game days is part of the fun.

I think if you like strategy games, you'll like this one. If not, then check out the demo on the eShop to see if you like it. Be warned: the early game is a bit hand-holdy, but it stops being like that after the one hour mark.

This was the first Zelda game I ever beat way back when. I remembered so little of it that I couldn't even remember how much I liked it or not, so this was less of a "does it still hold up" and more of a "was it even good?". Turns out, it's very good.

I love the art style of this game, it's so vibrant and colourful. The shrinking mechanic also leads to some incredible pixel art when you end up in "close up" view so regular items are drawn as towering over you. Even when not in a close up view, I love how Link is just a few pixels on the screen, with the indicator of where he is by a speech bubble with Links head in it.

It's a relatively small world, but it's packed with so much content, so many secrets, so many reasons to re-explore old areas with new items that it doesn't waste a single bit of the small size.

I'm a big fan of the dungeons and item selection in this game too.

My only real issue with the game is that they didn't let you assign an item to the L button, meaning you have exactly 2 buttons for all of your items - one of which is your sword so realistically you're working with only 1 spare button most of the time. Luckily switching items from the menu is very fast and it never felt pace-breaking to me; I just find it weird they had an entire other button to use and just ignored it.

Some of the things for 100% are also tedious. The figurine "quest" is a very slow, very grindy process. Then there's the Kinstone fusions, an idea I love with how they can give you more heart pieces, expand the world by adding characters to areas, or even progress little plotlines of their own. But they stuffed too many of them in, and as a result a lot of kinstone fusions just lead to more kinstones which is like the epitome of padding.

Cute game. I like the art style. The music is fairly catchy too, despite not being too memorable. But it's simple idea isn't enough to carry it through the whole thing. What makes it worse is how imprecise the whole mechanic the game is built around feels. You're constantly forced to make split second shots in mid-air, and all you can do it point in the right direction and hope it hits the target, rather than being one pixel too high, or just straight up grabbing on to something else by accident. It's a very frustrating experience in a bunch of game levels that feel very lifeless.

There's multiple types of collectables to get in a level. The problem I have with this whole mechanic is how it's very all or nothing. Getting 100% is nice, but if you're not going for it (and there's a good chance you won't since it'll mean replaying each level at least once just for the speed run collectable) then there's no reason to do the others. Just going through them:

-Grabbing every coin: Coins can be spent at a shop for either extra hats to wear, or artwork. You don't need to get the "every coin" collectable to buy things, but I guess the coins themselves at least have value, even if it is only aesthetic. The artwork reward is kinda dumb though since not only can you see most of the artwork just fine in the purchase menu, just with a "500 coins" plastered on it, but when you buy it and open it, it only fills about 40% of the screen. So do you really want to spend your time collecting coins to be able to see a small picture you can already see just fine on the menu itself?

-2 emeralds: Not really hidden at all, but generally slightly off the beaten path. No bonus to getting them at all by themselves.

-1 "skull" token: Found in hidden holes that lead to a short, harder platforming section. These could be fun to do just for the sake of the challenge, but the collectable itself doesn't do anything by itself.

-Notes: Each level contains a note providing a brief bit of...lore? Character depth? I dunno. Just random notes that are usually written by the Protagonists lost parents, or even random unseen characters or enemies. I guess they provide a benefit by themselves of just having something to read, but who really wanted to expand the premise of a game made to emulate the simple plot of old games where "save your parents" is literally the entire story?

-Speed run and no death: Obviously these are challenges by themselves that players may want to do, so it's just a reward for that I guess.

So yeah, if you're not going for 100% you have little reason to worry about any of these and can just go through the levels ignoring everything, making a simple game feel even more hollow.

That "little reason" though is the fact that you can occasionally find chests between levels. Many of them can be opened for free, but some require a certain amount of X collectables, or even X amount of perfected levels. These chests contain either an extra heart piece, or another hat. The heart pieces are obviously what you want, but it just feels like an ultimately lacklustre reward for the amount of effort to master so many levels in such a clunky game. Most of your deaths will come from bottomless pits anyway.

So this game that doesn't even feel good to play asks me to do so many things in a single level, and the only thing it can think to reward me with is more HP. Maybe if the game was fun I could accept that, but as it stands, nah. Better rewards could be things like faster speed, longer range, a bigger hitbox for the guns tongue. Anything that would feel rewarding and make you feel like you were getting progressively more powerful. Not something that exists pretty much just for making the final boss easier, and ironically allowing levels to be sped through even faster by being able to ignore most hazards that aren't optional.

The game tried to capture the magic of that PS1/N64 era, and the best thing it captured from there was when you liked a game in your childhood only to replay it as an adult and realise it aged horribly.