I love how Funky's voice lines have not changed in the slightest since Wii. You can't top peak.
Anyways, the Booster Course Pass is... good. Hell, it's bordering on great. And the value is pretty fuckin' fantastic. 25 bucks to double the track count in one of the best Mario Karts, if not THE best? Plus 7 great new characters and also Peachette? Sounds pretty good to me. And it is... but I feel like it rarely ever exceeds "pretty good" in my eyes.
Now, to be fair to this DLC, being attached to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe already sets a lot of expectations that I don't think it was ever trying to reach. This was probably made by a less experienced team to give Mario Kart fans something to chew on while the main team worked on the next big entry. Porting old tracks, mostly from Tour, was probably just the most cost-effective way to do such a thing... but it's very jarring to see these noticeably cheaper-feeling tracks just one button press away from the base game tracks.
Generally I just didn't really feel much seeing a returning track, even if it was one of my favorites, because they didn't really do a whole lot to make them feel as polished as a retro track from the base 8DX. The lack of any extra pizzazz also just makes the questionable track choices even more baffling than they would be otherwise. They just feel like wastes of space that could have been used for other better tracks. Like sure, Airship Fortress probably wouldn't be that great in the Booster Course Pass style but it'd be better than fuckin' plain ass Toad Circuit.
The only track I can really think of that was upgraded in a way similar to that of the original MK8 was Bowser Castle 3.
Overall I still think the Booster Course Pass is a decent purchase, and more Mario Kart is more Mario Kart, but it leaves a lot to be desired and I hope that if they do something like this again, they put a bit more care into it. Even if it results in less tracks in total. I mean, I don't really need another Mario Kart game with 96 tracks in it.

It's fine, there's things to like about it but I don't think it's for me. It's kinda just a slower and more frustrating take on 2D Mario. This also might be an unfair comparison since there's a huge leap in hardware between the two, but going from Wario Land 4 to this felt super jarring, Wario is so slow here. His fat German ass won't H-H-H-HURRY THE FUCK UP! His jump also feels too floaty and a tad inconsistent at times. I've tended to notice that this is an issue I have with a lot of 8-bit games I've played as of late, and I'm not sure if it's an input delay issue from playing the games through emulators on displays they weren't meant for, or if I'm just bad. Maybe it's a mix of both.
I didn't get all the treasures, and because you lose all of your coins upon death (which is the most demoralizing shit in the world btw), in combination with me having the worst gambling luck imaginable, I got a shitty ending. Maybe I'll replay the game some day and get everything but I don't feel super motivated to do that right now. I'm gonna try and get a Virtual Boy emulator working so I can play the Virtual Boy game but if that doesn't work out then I'll just move on to Wario Land 2.

(I'm writing this shit at like midnight right after finishing the game, so that's why this is completely disorganized and shitty)
I'll admit, leading up to the release of this game, I wasn't really super excited for it.
I loved Breath of the Wild, but I was kinda satisfied by that game alone, it felt meaty enough that I didn't really need another game in that style, so when a sequel was announced back in 2019, I just thought "Oh. Cool."
...to be fair there was other shit going on in that E3 Direct that sorta overshadowed Zelda for me.
I mean, come on, they got Banjo in Smash! They revealed the new Animal Crossing! Luigi's Mansion 3 looked great!
...I barely play Banjo (or Smash in general nowadays), New Horizons was a disappointment, but hey at least Luigi was pretty cool. Oh and Pokemon shit the bed, I almost forgot.
Later trailers for BOTW2 didn't really catch my eye either, add on the fact that this was Nintendo's first 70 dollar title, for a game that reused its map from its predecessor. That definitely didn't help things.

And then they started actually showing off new shit only a few months before the game was supposed to come out, and that's what got me interested, but I still wasn't sure if I wanted to spend 70 bucks on it. So it's a good thing my brother just straight up gave me his copy. I was originally just supposed to borrow it but he just let me have it. So that's cool.

Anyways, is the game good? Yeah. It's good. Really good. But it also left me feeling pretty confused once I was done with it all.
Back when this game came out I heard people saying that it fixed most, if not all of their issues with Breath of the Wild, and I just don't get that. A lot of the things that were wrong with Breath of the Wild are still wrong with this game, just to a lesser degree. If you didn't like the idea of your weapons breaking, then this game won't change your mind. I didn't dislike durability back in the first game, and I don't mind it here, but it sorta runs into the opposite issue as the first game. In the lategame of BOTW, there wasn't really a lot of incentive to fight enemies because they'd usually just have weapons that were worse than the ones you broke to kill them in the first place. In TOTK, because of the new monster parts mechanic, every single weapon in the game is capable of being good, so my hoarder ass picks up every decent weapon I see because they all have the potential to become Bokoblin Fucker 9000™️ by just attaching a single Silver enemy horn to them. And now for every weapon I break, there's like 5 more to pick up and my inventory gets completely clogged. I maxed out my weapon slots with Korok seeds and I still had issues with inventory space. Is this just a me problem? Probably.
Enemy variety still kinda sucks, visual variety in general is pretty bad. If anything, the visual variety is a bit worse in TOTK. All of the new major additions to the world left me disappointed a lot of the time because of how samey they looked. Everywhere in the Depths looks the same. Most of the caves look indistinguishable from each other, and the same could be said of the Sky Islands. For every cool thing you find in these places there's like 10 copy-and-pasted things surrounding it.
Don't even get me started on the Blessing Shrines. I don't even remember them being THIS egregious in BOTW. But there's almost 50 of them here and 95% of them are fecal matter. They are either "Take this crystal to a place that isn't very far away at all" or "Literally just in a cave". God why the FUCK did I decide that I was gonna get all of the shrines before beating Ganon, I'm such an IDIOT. The shrine cleanup sucked complete balls because it was almost entirely these kinds of shrines.
All of these issues I've mentioned play into what I think is this game's biggest shortcoming, though that shortcoming is mostly my own damn fault for even letting it happen in the first place. The late game sucked ass for me, and that's because instead of heading straight to Ganon right after clearing my last temple, I did a bunch of extra shit that just padded the length. I got all the Shrines, all the Lightroots, I maxed out my batteries, I upgraded all of the Sages, I upgraded a bunch of armor. All of this when I could have been done and satisfied so many hours earlier by just fighting Ganon with like 30 hearts or whatever. The sense of discovery that I adored about my time with the game up to that point was gone because I was deliberately seeking things out, and it just became a game of "get on your 9 Zonaite hoverbike or just teleport to the place you marked on your map to get a trinket you'll never use". I did all of those stable quests with Penn to get the full frog armor set only for it to never actually get used because the haha funny hoverbike made climbing obsolete.
So yeah, if you're gonna play this game, don't do what I did. Just go fight Ganon when you feel like the game is starting to get stale. And if you feel like coming back after that, the game isn't going anywhere.
This may have been a really negative sounding review, but I really did enjoy my time with this game a lot, well, up until I didn't.
To leave it off on a positive note, I sorta underestimated how nice it felt to be back in this Hyrule after 6 years of not having played BOTW in full. The reused map may have been a turn-off at first, but while I was playing I wasn't thinking "damn Nintendo is so lazy", I just got sucked into the world again because of how believable it felt. I may have put the game down for years, but time was still passing while I was away. Things changed, people got older, I became a lot more jaded, but Hyrule was the same place I fell in love with in 2017.

Pizza Tower still goty though

Hot off the heels of 101%ing Pizza Tower, and eagerly anticipating the release of Antonblast, I recently had a horrifying realization.
I've never beaten Wario Land 4. I've played it several times before and have enjoyed it every time, but I have never seen it through to the end.
Wario is my favorite Mario character and yet I haven't even beaten his greatest achievement? Damn, I feel like a fake fan.

Well I beat it now. And yeah it's good. It's the dictionary definition of short but sweet.
You can probably beat this game in an afternoon, so go play it if you haven't already. Do it. Now. H-H-H-HURRY UP!

Origami King is a extraordinarily flawed game, however it's one that I had a great time with.
This game probably won't get a full review by me, at least not any time soon, because I feel as if I should just focus on writing my Pokemon Scarlet review for the time being as it's a big project that I've had on my mind since that game came out. Maybe I'll review TOK if I ever review the first game like I've hinted at before, but nothing is guaranteed.

However, there is one thing I want to talk about in this "review", and that's the combat system. Even after 35 hours of play (Jesus, only 35 hours? I could have sworn it was more.) I still have no idea if I like this game's combat or not. It might just be the weirdest turn based battle system I've seen in a game... albeit my scope is very limited so what do I know.

You're placed inside the middle of a ring, with four rows and twelve columns, which you can rotate and slide respectively. Enemies are placed across the ring's panels and it's your job to line them up in a 1x4 line to jump on them, or a 2x2 grid to bonk them with your hammer. You're only given a small amount of ring movements per turn, so you usually have to think pretty hard about how to approach each given situation. If you get a good lineup, you get an attack boost and you'll (usually) take out every single enemy in one turn. If you get a bad lineup, you'll miss out on the attack boost and will probably have to take another turn or two to clean up. I probably didn't explain it well at all, but hey I did call it a weird ass battle system.
Now, with all that I've outlined so far, I actually don't dislike this. I'm unsure as to why it's like this exactly, rather than just sticking to a combat system more akin to 64 or TTYD, but it can be fun trying to twist your noggin around finding a good lineup.
...Or, it would be fun, if there wasn't a timer breathing down my neck at all times.
For the simpler puzzles, the timer is basically a non-issue. You usually have more than enough time to figure it out and the solution is always pretty obvious. But when you get to the more complex late game puzzles that require 3 moves, and believe me they get kinda mindfucky, the timer becomes super frustrating.
So then, you have a couple options. You can use the coins that you've collected to either extend the timer, where every 100 coins is worth 10 extra seconds, or you can pay the Toads you've saved to solve the puzzles for you, which costs 999 coins. Are coins a rare and valuable enough resource to disincentivize you from abusing these mechanics?
Hahahahaha that's a really funny joke. Coins are fucking everywhere in this game. You get them for filling holes in the overworld, hitting blocks, saving Toads, they're plentiful across the map, and of course, you get them for winning battles. Wanna know how many coins I had at the end of the game? Over 100,000. I spent thousands upon thousands of coins extending the timer and paying Toads,and I even spent tens of thousands buying the super expensive collectibles, and yet I was never once remotely close to going broke.
So in my opinion, the combat ranges from way too fucking hard to pathetically easy with no good middle ground.

I don't really have a good way to transition into the next point so uhhhh... let's talk about accessories and weapons, this game's replacement for badges and stickers/cards.
I'll discuss the accessories first. There's 5 categories of accessories.
- Heart Plus, which raises your max health in battle.
- Guard Plus, which raises your defense.
- Time Plus, which extends your puzzle timer.
- Alerts, which notify you of a specific collectible in an area.
- Miscellaneous, which is just everything else.
The first three categories all have different tiers, bronze, silver and gold. Once you have an accessory of a higher tier, there's no reason to use a lower, which makes me wonder why they're still even in your inventory at all once you buy the upgrade. Something to note is that there's nothing resembling Badge Points in this game, so there's no strategy in picking your accessories. You can't, for example, choose to sacrifice some extra health for the sake of extra defense, or extra time for some extra health. No, you're just gonna want to have all three gold accessories on at all times, there's no reason to not do that.
The alerts annoy me, because you can only use one at a time, but with no BP system... why? But those aren't related to battle so I won't linger on em.
You can only use two miscellaneous accessories at once, however only one actually assists you in battle... well, that's kind of a stretch, but I'll get to that when I talk about partners. The other misc accessories range from purely aesthetic like the Retro Soundbox and Petal Bag, to practically useless like the Confetti Vacuum and potentially the Coin Step Counter (I never bought that one), to actually useful like the Membership Card (which upgrades and actually does just replace the previous tier when you get the upgrade lol).

Weapons are limited-use, stronger versions of your main boot and hammer attacks. Side note, apparently Sticker Star and Color Splash didn't have normal boot and hammer attacks, you could only attack using stickers and cards, which you could run out of... what the fuck. Fortunately, this game remedies that stupid fucking dumb dogshit idea and allows Jumpman to actually jump (and hammer) at all times.
Weapons have three different tiers. Shiny, Flashy, and Legendary. Each of course being stronger than the last. They also come in a few different types... like... just a few. There's stronger versions the normal boots and hammer, nothing too crazy about those. There's iron boots which can jump on spiked enemies, hurlhammers that attack in a straight line and can hit flying enemies. And lastly, gold boots/hammers that don't come in tiers, however they give you a bunch of coins with every hit... and that's it. That's all of em. Nothing that inflicts unique status conditions or anything like in the old games. The most unique thing you get is the Hurlhammer but even then, it's outclassed by the Iron Boots in nearly every way.
The thing with this battle system is, it doesn't really allow for that many interesting enemy encounters. You deal with every group of enemies the same way. Are they arranged in a 1x4 line? Jump on em. Are they arranged in a 2x2 box? Hammer em. Lategame enemies won't die in one hit with your normal jump or hammer, so what's the solution? Just use the stronger weapon, or take some minuscule damage and take another turn. The normal jump and hammer become practically useless once you start fighting enemies with more HP, so might I just ask... why aren't the stronger weapons just permanent upgrades like in the old games? Why would I ever use the Shiny Boots when I have the Flashy Boots equipped? Sure there IS a durability system, but that doesn't mean really mean shit when the game gives you so many weapons. You can also just buy weapons and they're really damn cheap.
I'm fine with things like the Iron Boots, Hurlhammers and Gold Weapons being limited use items however, though honestly I'd just prefer Badges and Flower Points to replicate the idea.

...Why are partners so bad in this game? They only ever have one basic attack, you can't control them, they don't assist you in the Vellumental Dungeons or in boss fights, a couple chapters straight up have no partners, and worst of all... every few turns, they will just miss their attack. Because fuck you. You only have one row of enemies left and they're on low HP? Fuck you, your partner missed and now you have to wait another turn, because the devs decided that wasting the player's time is a vital and fun mechanic. It's not fun to strategize around like a low accuracy move in a Pokemon game, because it's something that's just guaranteed to happen and it serves nothing to the gameplay experience other than just "oh well I guess the battle isn't ending in this turn".
The only role partners serve in this game is to just do cleanup work for the enemies you didn't kill. They're not party members that drastically change how you approach a battle.
Also the last accessory, the Ally Tambourine, sucks dick. It boosts the attack power of the partners but they always just kill the enemies in one hit from my experience anyways.

Heh... "experience"... get it? The devs clearly didn't get it because this game doesn't have experience points. The only things you get from battle are coins and confetti. I've already stated how coins aren't rare in the slightest, so what about confetti? Second verse, same as the first. Hell, it's even more common than coins. You can get that shit just from hitting a tree over and over. So at a certain point I thought to myself: Why am I even doing these battles? All I'm doing is paying a bunch of coins to bypass puzzles I can't solve just so I can waste my weapon's durability to get even more coins and confetti that I don't need.

And yet... I still felt immense satisfaction from doing them. I wouldn't exactly say I had fun during most battles, I felt more frustrated than anything, but SOMETHING was drawing me in. And I couldn't even tell you what that something was. And that's why, despite all of my bitching, and despite it frankly being a very poorly designed battle system, I return back to the beginning of this "review"... I still have no idea if I like this game's combat or not. It's the most conflicted I've ever felt about a major mechanic in any game that I've played. When I think about it for even more than a second, it all falls apart. But that still doesn't take away from the great feeling I get whenever I finish one of these battles.

I guess I should mention the boss fights. I won't go as in depth on them, as I've gone on long enough already, but also because the boss fights work completely differently from the rest of the fights in the game. And to be honest, they're fuckin' great.
All of them have their own cool unique mechanics that change how you interact with the ring, and you have multiple different ways to approach the boss rather than just having "put these enemies on the right tile to get an attack boost and one shot them". The bosses were a consistent highlight of my entire playthrough.

...Jesus Christ, I wasn't expecting this to be that long.
I guess I'll shove in a few extra notes, unrelated to the combat.
- Yeah obviously the character design (or lack there of) is real bad, but the one that got on my nerves the most was the Origami Craftsman. This dude literally created the main villain, Olly (and by extension, your companion Olivia), but he's literally just a fucking nameless green Toad with no backstory.
- Every game should have unlockable concept art. That should be a law of game development.
- This game's visuals make me SUPER NUT
- This game's music makes me MAX NUT
- Holy SHIT Mario moves so slow. They really should have brought back the Spin Dash from 64 because some of the areas in this game are huge.

Alright @fabledorigami592 I did it BITCH