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.

It's about as basic as an RPG can get. Which makes sense, because it is, you know, one of the earliest RPGs.

I don't know if I can recommend it outside of a historical context. It's a simple game, with standard turn-based gameplay. You control a party of four that each have their own class (which you can pick at the start, neat I guess), you roam around a world filled with random encounters, and you stumble through dungeons which advances the story. The story isn't amazing, by the way, but it gets a little interesting at the end. And then it ends soon after that. So, pretty standard stuff.

The main problem is the random encounters, honestly. Not that there's anything wrong with the randomness, but the sheer number of encounters makes things a slog. I can't imagine enjoying this game without the speed-up function. Yes, I did say "enjoy," because despite what I'm saying, I did enjoy this game overall.

Exploration is the fun part. As much as some people dislike how cryptic old games can be, I can enjoy that. It's fun figuring out where you need to get instead of someone telling you where to go. Adds to the journey, I suppose. In that regard, I liked Final Fantasy.

But, to the average individual, I don't think I could recommend it. It's neat to explore it for the history behind it, but hard to suggest it for anything other than that.

(P.S.: For anyone wondering why I didn't turn off random encounters: the mobile version doesn't, at the time of writing this, have that feature. So far, only the console versions have it.)

It didn't resonate with me as much as the original, though I think that's mostly down to my relating more with Max than Chloe. I actually think a lot is improved from the first game; Deck Nine better "gets" what makes this universe work compared to DON'T NOD, from the little character moments (oh my gosh everything with Steph is great) to the big emotional set pieces (even if "The Tempest" is a bit on-the-nose). Yes, Backtalk is obviously a far less compelling mechanic than Rewind, but it's a fine alternative. Sort of fun to look at it from a series perspective: you have all these main characters with larger-than-life abilities that act as extensions of their personalities, then you have some lesbian punk drop-out whose superpower is that she gets mad sometimes.

I will admit, I don't entirely see Chloe and Rachel's relationship, at least in the scope of this game. Chloe, I get - she so needs ANYONE to relate to her, I could see her falling hard for the first person to reciprocate those feelings (we see a lot of that desperation's aged into hostility by the time of LiS1). I don't quite get what Rachel sees in Chloe, or at least what'd have them go from relative strangers to deeeeeep lovers only partway into the game. I think everything else would've worked just fine for me if I'd played Before the Storm first, but I would've had to take as given that Chloe and Rachel end up together. But maybe I'm just missing some nuance.

Runaway funniest character between the first two games: prequel Victoria. Could not get enough of her in this game.

I think this is the most pointless mainline Mario game to exist.

It's not a BAD game. The level design is fine enough. But it's just okay, and didn't really need to come out when 3D Land came before it on the same platform and NSMBU came out just a few months later.

And the main gimmick for this game doesn't really make sense. The main draw is to collect as many coins as you can. But...there's nothing really that rewards you for doing so. Your main objective is still to beat Bowser. You don't use your coins that you collect in many meaningful ways. If anything, the sheer amount of coins makes getting a Game Over nearly impossible, since you're getting lives constantly.

You can collect 1 million coins. That nets you a new title screen. But that's it. If you don't care about that, then collecting coins is pointless, and really, by this point in the 2D series, collecting coins was basically already pointless.

Again, not a bad game. Just an 'okay' game.

A game with a complicated history.

A game with a simple yet enjoyable battle system.

A game with witty, memorable dialog and characters.

A game that makes you smile.

A game that makes you sad.

But still, a game that makes the whole journey feel worthwhile.

That...is MOTHER 3.

A pretty compelling detective story. The mechanics kind of drag—there's a lot of randomly selecting and reselecting menu options just to try to get the exact set the game wants in the exact order it expects, and I can't imagine doing that without a walkthrough to get yourself unstuck periodically. But the plot itself really picks up in the latter half of the game once you start to see enough of the facts that you can start piecing together theories, and it even asks the player to make deductions without handholding a few times. A good balance of making me feel clever without making the entire thing obvious.