Disclosure: I was QA on this title

Summon Night is a cute little action game with some light crafting elements, a pokemon-esque attitude, and a tournament arc-based story. It works well for what it is, but most everything is fairly shallow, if satisfying.

Combat is as dead simple as it gets. Weapons have a single combo string and one or two extra moves (usually an upwards attack and a charged attack) and spells are simple line attacks, heals, and buffs. Movement feels sluggish at the start, but forces you to pay attention to your attacks, positioning, and blocks, which injects a little bit more depth into the combat. It is satisfying, but never really feels like more than block to get an opening and then spam your attacks.
Each weapon has a bit of a different playstyle that makes it rewarding to find one you like (and you can equip up to 3 at once for most combat). The game sort of pushes you toward swords, even though drill is obviously the coolest.

I like the sprite work in Summon Night quite a bit. Characters are cartoony and expressive and the pixels are very well done. Small touches like each weapon you craft showing up on your character add a bit more charm as well.

Crafting weapons is very simple, but it is sort of fun to progress through the largely linear weapon progression. I like that the crafting itself is core to the gameplay and also tightly tied to the narrative. The ideal here would be a few more steps towards the Monster Hunter model, where my choice of weapon has a lot of meaning, but like the rest of this game, this does well enough for what is needed.

Everyone loves a tournament arc! There aren't a ton of games that are just "go through this tournament" and it is cool to see it here. There are diversions, of course, but largely you are competing to become the next Craftlord, which basically just means 1v1'ing all the other crafts-kids in town. This is classic anime storytelling that the game leverages well to give the player motivation and to introduce a bunch of rivals/friends for you to interact with. The simple approach here works very well.

I like Summon Night for what it is, though it isn't quite interesting enough to hold my attention on this revisit. I do have a soft spot for it since it was the first game I worked professionally!

The game is correct. It's my favorite Harry Potter game and the best book of the franchise. Although, the game is really really short. It takes 5 hours to beat it and it is really easy.

If that is not a problem to you, the RPG system is pretty good. And if you're a fan of Ron, you'll be disappointed cause you won't play him a lot.

Correct is the good word to describe it.

The graphics in this game are pretty amazing, yes, you may argue it looks "ugly" but the 3D effect for the GBA is very convincing and works wonders for a Pinball game, making it so you can actually hit the ball forwards and up, and this game even incorporates hitting the ball in the air to hit things which is a great idea and great use of this tech! Secondly, the IDEA of the way the progression works is a solid one, it takes the "open world filled with non linear missions" type structure straight from Mario 64, dropping you into worlds and challenging you to go and grab stars to unlock doors a literal translation of Mario 64 to pinball, fantastic idea!

Everything begins to fall apart in the execution however. Every single board, and I mean every, single, board. Is just a square, with some blocks, and some enemies. Thats it. And rather than actually take advantage of the GBA's power we are still limited to 1 board at a time, with screen transitions like this is a GB Pinball game. Every single level just feels identical, and every identical level isn't even fun to begin with! They are simply tedious. There is no interesting puzzles or gimmicks, it is always as simple as, youre in a rectangle space, heres some shit, go smack the ball into the shit, get the star, move on. But do not be mistaken into thinking this tedium is easy, because these tiny spread-out objects move, and you must hit all the specific objects, as if you hit the OTHER specific objects on the board you will trigger the wrong thing and have to start over, and usually to start over you must purposely go BACK a board and make your way BACK up again by hitting MORE tedious objects in the correct way. Even the bosses in this game are tedious as all hell, especially the final boss which is an absolute nightmare due to the previously mentioned specification order of hitting blocks and the way you must climb your way back up the board again to retry. The amount of precision needed to do even the most basic action in this game just makes it feel borderline unplayable at times.

I played this all the time on vacation many years ago, but for some reason never got far enough to even get into Bowser's Castle. After grinding through this last night though, I think I understand why.

So Mario Pinball Land's premise is that of an adventure game with stages; you've got three lives to collect all the keys to unlock the gate by beating the necessary 4 bosses, collect enough Stars to unlock the central gate, and then successfully fight and defeat Bowser to beat the game. But it's really fucking hard and infuriating, and here are some reasons why:

- Unlike Pokemon Pinball, you can't just touch enemies to deal damage; there's a damage threshold based off of the ball's momentum. So falling into enemies or bumping them from the sides will rarely ever do damage unless you happen to be under an Invincibility Star's effect, and you have to heavily rely on flipper skillshots. But...

- Skillshots are really difficult to pull off in this game. It's a combination of the flippers being really tiny, the stages being quite large and cluttered in comparison to the flippers, and that angles beyond the central "cone" of around 45 degrees outward are almost unfathomable due to the size of the flippers and how quickly the ball tends to be moving nearby. In addition, a lot of targets are on some kind of timer (i.e. red coins timer, boss cycles, Monty Mole vulnerability state before popping back out to his previous location, etc) and the ball often has an elastic collision with the flipper, so it bounces off just enough for there to be a significant delay, forcing you to waste time as the ball comes back to the flippers' correct position for a trickshot (unless the ball happens to already be coming at you at the exact right position), usually giving enemies enough time to reset.

- Powerups exist in the game (and some can be bought with yellow/blue coins), but most are kind of useless. Red mushroom just makes you bigger and doesn't actually seem to do anything other than this, because the ball doesn't do any more damage to enemies and will still take knockback. Invincibility Stars are sometimes useful because they'll just insta kill, but you still have to get your trickshots off in one minute; also it sucks when trying to hit Monty Moles with it because they'll just disappear without you getting a 1-Up. The Yoshi Egg provides a multiball, but I found it often gets in the way because your balls can collide and destroy your momentum, thus stopping you from dealing any actual damage. The lightning bolt is useful and will instakill most enemies on screen... except for a lot of enemies and bosses that will just get knocked down and must be hit a second time. As such, the best item in the game is actually the double lightning bolt, which must be grinded for through a Question Mark roulette found after beating all the enemies on screen when the Star's been collected.

- Any defeated enemy progress towards a Star/Question Mark or a boss fight is automatically reset if you exit via a door on stage. If the Star/Question Mark appears from defeating them all and you go through a door, that's also a reset. And it's really, really easy to go through doors due to the angles involved.

- If the ball falls directly vertical towards the center of the flippers, the hole is actually just big enough to where the ball will not contact either of the tips of the flipper and just fall straight through. Not much you can do about this one unless you have the pipe up.

- Blue coins do exist in this game, and are usually collected via "combos" where you kill more than one enemy in quick succession, or dropped in limited quantities after beating a boss. You need them for the tent in the Fair stage, where you can use them as payment for special timed trials (such as one with hitting back Chain Chomps) where you could potentially win a Star. But they're really tough and intimidating in requiring a lot of precision/luck, and there's only so many blue coins you'll realistically get within a timeframe, so it's often just safer to buy the 1-Up for 25 blue coins instead.

Let me reiterate the objective with the above context: you have to get at least 15 power stars by killing all enemies in a room (with progress that can be reset if you go through any doors) or red/blue coin trials (timed and intimidating), beat all four of the bosses without falling through the flippers and resetting progress, travel between stages with the cannons at the start of the stage where you could actually lose a life, and then beat Bowser in two phases (one where you attack him and a second where you have to bash Bowser-Ball against either of the two walls on the right/left, scoring three successful hits against one of the sides) without Mario dropping out at the bottom resetting the whole thing, and accomplish all of this within three lives with hopefully no mishaps of the ball falling straight through the flippers or you accidentally lifting one of the flippers while the ball goes under the flipper and over the pipe, with extra lives requiring significant amounts of grinding (100 yellow coins or 25 blue coins) or a ton of patience hitting Monty Mole in specific areas over and over again before he pops back to previous locations. And that's not even mentioning how goddamn hard it is to kill some of the enemies (some require two successive hits within a small timeframe before getting up again, one room requires specific trickshots off of a pyramid to hit flying Kondors, Bowser's Castle has some rooms with Fly Guys so you have to wait until they descend to hit them hard enough, there's actually a room in Snowyland where the goal is not to insta kill all the skating Shy Guys but you instead have to aim for specific Shy Guys so they're all the same color at once with no visual clues to hint you in on this immediately, etc), or coin/item grinding against enemies for specific powerups against enemies (or mini-shrooms to enter specific rooms), or how after inserting in the boss key in the starting room at Bowser's Castle, the stages generally get tougher with more hazards (such as the snowmen waking up in Snowyland and now throwing snowballs at you; they can't be permanently defeated within a room by the way, just stunned) if you decide to go back for stars you missed or the red coin stars that only appear after inserting the key.

I think this is supposed to be a kid's game by the way.