This review contains spoilers

Completed a full run with every palette, and feel like I mellowed out on this DLC quite a bit. Maybe my rating is a bit unfair, because Side Order is really cool!
Its take on a roguelike is great in concept, and it has a lot of neat ideas of how to meld that sort of progression with the way past singleplayer modes worked as stage clear games. Being able to dangle each reward you’ll get before choosing a stage, while showing exactly what you’d be in for if you went for it, provides a lot of risk and reward. There’s been times where I’ve actively avoided stages that would give me a better palette upgrade because there was a “Danger” warning or because the difficulty was set too high for me to currently handle. The variety of builds you can create with each weapon also really helps reframe the way I would normally play the game, having to work around luck, or solely using my sub for damage, or using a kit I’ve normally never touched before.

I really hope this roguelike mode continues in future Splatoon games as a fun side thing, because my biggest issue with Side Order is how underbaked it feels. There's a good amount there on first blush, but the game ultimately asks you to complete at least 12 full runs when it feels like there’s only enough content for 5-6. After just a couple runs, I was already running into objectives and stages that I had seen more than once before. Runs ultimately felt like they wholly blended together because I kept getting the same objectives, over and over. The builds and weapons you use add a good amount of variety on their own, but after a while it felt like I was tackling the same things the same way each time. The bosses feel limp after the first fight, the objectives start getting annoying rather than interesting, and I came out of my final run feeling pretty bored by the whole affair. It’s a shame, because like I said, the core concept of a Splatoon roguelike is cool!! There’s just simply not enough content and intrigue to keep replaying any more than you need to. Maybe doing some zero hack runs would make it a bit more exciting…

The story is fine. It’s not much, but it gives a nice little wrap-up on the loose ends of Octo Expansion, while also providing a look into Marina’s past and her own feelings after the events of the Deepsea Metro. Acht is a great new character, and it’s cool seeing someone else who was only represented through their music get a larger role. But, of course, at the end of the day, it feels like this whole DLC was made just to have Pearl and Marina’s relationship be as unsubtle as possible, and what else could I really ask for?

stinger flyyyyynnnn dude stinger flynn in the carrrrr

It's scary how joyless this game is. Me and my friends were having a genuinely fun time with the original 1-2 Switch and as soon as we booted up this one its like all the fun was instantly sucked out of the room. The best part of the game is when you could make your own icons using pics on your phone

It’s like Dragon Quest Minecraft. Don’t beat around the bush about it. As much as I hate these surface-level comparisons, most of the thoughts I have about Dragon Quest Builders 2 can be sourced directly from what it does the same or differently from Minecraft. It’s unavoidable.

That being said, Dragon Quest Builders 2 does a lot of things I wish Minecraft would do! Its main focus is on town building, creating a cute connection to the mainline Dragon Quest games as the towns you build serve as being equivalent to the towns and castles you’d ordinarily find in those games. Building is essential throughout the game's runtime, cycling between fighting monsters and collecting materials in service of making more livable and workable spaces for your townspeople. It has a much more goal-oriented style of play, sprinkling new little objectives to occupy your time with so you always have something to do. It makes what you build not just there for the sake of looking nice, but to also serve various functional purposes! Town sizes start small and grow over time, so it’s almost like solving a puzzle trying to find how to neatly fit every building in your town together. It makes for an experience more linear than other Minecraft-likes but still asking a lot of creativity of the player if they so desire.

That is until you get to the blueprints, that is. Multiple points in the game ask you to create an exact version of a structure they planned out for you, turning the creative process of building and fitting your space into a chore where you find all the little blocks you need and arrange them just like the game wants you to. It’s an awful dampener on an otherwise great time, one that’s only made worse when certain blueprints have your townspeople just get all the materials and build the whole damn thing for you. What’s even the point by then? Back on my home island, I wanted to use the desert area to create a large western-style town, with minecart rails connecting the homes from the shops from the pubs. But when I got there, they grabbed my hand and told me I was gonna make a pyramid instead, and every single building I made in that area had to be inside it. What a load of bullshit.

Dragon Quest Builders 2 kept me engaged with its town building gameplay loop and mini-objectives always giving me something to do, but it always seemed a little too interested in what it wanted to see rather than what the player wanted. In a game with so much potential for creative ideas to flow freely, it feels like a massive waste to limit that creativity the way it does.

the blob can fly up and across

Out of all the Nintendo properties, it felt like Fire Emblem had the most “edge” to it. It was niche for a reason; hard, obtuse, and the permadeath mechanic making it particularly abrasive to those who don’t play turn-based strategy RPGs. Although enjoying my time, I bounced off of Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones when I was 13 after I got a little too cocky with my favorite unit and watched him get slaughtered and removed from the rest of the game. It’s the type of thing you wouldn’t expect when you think of Fire Emblem now, and that's certainly why it was revived with Awakening.

Fire Emblem: Awakening makes a clean break from what Fire Emblem was, mostly through it’s new aesthetic and writing qualities, extra ease of access, easier difficulty scaling and gasp an option to turn off the permadeath!? More likely than not this series’ saving grace was how it shaved off its edges, embracing newcomers with its quality of life features and various ways to tune the difficulty to your liking. This is what made me more approachable to Fire Emblem as it was for many others, and it’s something I really appreciate. I’m still not the type to get a thrill out of being punished harshly for my mistakes, especially with a genre I’m still not very experienced with, and it just lowers the floor while still allowing hardcore players to have their fun. It’s nice!

The other part that caused it’s newfound success was, well, the fanservice. Fire Emblem was always “anime”, sure, but it never indulged in the excess that this game and those that came after it do. It’s not just a strategy RPG anymore, it's a Dating Sim! Marry the hottest soldiers and make little children to take into the battlefield with you! Supports are a series staple for sure, but it surely couldn’t have been given as much importance as it is in this game. Most of the paralogues are directly linked to getting S supports and collecting your unit’s future children, and a lot of the writing and character development is tied behind support conversations. I never enjoyed trying to build supports in battle, as it never felt like making clever strategy and more just sacrificing better options to make my units like each other more, or else I’d lose the benefits of stats, writing, and even an extra unit. A lot of the grinding I did was specifically to build up these supports so I didn’t have to deal with them later, and it was exhausting. In the end it wasn’t even really worth it, as all it showed me was how poor a lot of the writing was, how one-note the characters would be, and the units I would get I ended up barely ever using in lieu of the guys I already stacked up for hours before them. Also there's just an honest to god 1000-year old dragon girl who looks like she's 10.

Fire Emblem: Awakening made the best choice for preserving the life of the series. Everything it did to draw in new audiences clearly worked in its favor, thrusting the series out of its niche status into being one of Nintendo’s flagship series, even if it had to make some sacrifices along the way. The core gameplay and accessibility features kept me playing to the end, and now it feels like I’ve learned to ride a bike with training wheels and am ready to take them off. That’s probably the best thing this game could do for me... it made me feel ready to play better Fire Emblem games!

The ending sequence of the game is it's saving grace in how it uses what it taught against the player in increasingly neat ways, but a clever concept ends up being completely gutted by some of the worst puzzle design I've ever had the displeasure of playing. It turns out a mechanic that mostly makes for cool Twitter clips couldn’t service that many unique puzzle designs outside "search around a room filled with little decorations until you find the single interactable thing". The amount of pissing around I had to do, staring at chairs and tables and potted plants and other objects that looked interactable just to not do anything seriously hampered the experience, and led to more than a few groans and mutterings along the lines of “fuck off”. For how much this game wants to be Portal, it seems to have no idea that it was so minimalistic for a reason!

Xenoblade Chronicles X is the shortest Xenoblade game. If you really wanted to, you could blaze through the story content and reach the end in like, 40 hours. That’s less than half the time it took me to finish the recently released Xenoblade Chronicles 3, in fact! But you’re kinda missing the point if you play it that way.
By far Monolith Soft’s biggest and most ambitious project, Xenoblade Chronicles X aims to impress in every way it can. Soaking up every bit of the meek Wii U hardware to create a massive, gorgeous world, nearly bursting with overlaying systems and mechanics, and a wholly indulgent dive into Takahashi’s very not subtle love of Mobile Suit Gundam. This only makes it more surprising when you find that what X is trying to do, what it wants the player to do most, tends to be pretty quiet.

In the same sort of vein as Majora’s Mask, most of this game's interesting story and gameplay content is set to the side. While the giant mecha combat and gunslinging is saved for the story content, the game wholly encourages, even forces you to engage in its abundance of side content, to enrich yourself in the city of NLA and the plight of the people in it. Most of what you do is helping your potential party members and other citizens do some pretty tame stuff that still sheds light on the difficulty humanity has had adjusting to this planet. You’ll help someone in Lao’s squad get a ring for a girl he likes, find Elma enjoying her time playing with a cat, do some trivial electrical repairs, small things like this that give you a better insight into what these people think and feel.
And no matter who you talk to, the events that got you all here never stop weighing heavy on them all. Everything, in one way or another, leads back to Earth. What they used to do, how they enjoyed time off, their families… things they can only grasp at memories of now. Unlike a game like Majora’s Mask, the quiet moments don’t get filled with a dread of oncoming doom, but a sorrow of a doom that’s already passed.

Of course, these quests also get gameplay rewards too! Yay!! Let’s talk about gameplay now! On the surface, the combat system in X feels very similar to its predecessor. Aside from introducing way too many extra eccentricities to make the systems and how to build around them harder to understand, the core of it becomes a lot faster with one thing: the Overdrive system. Overdrive, like a lot of the gameplay systems in X, is really obtuse, not explained well, and given to you way too early to know how to use it, but once you learn it becomes not just the centerpiece of combat, but most of it you’ll do. Overdrive is a state that will drastically improve your attack, resistances, and speed but requires near constant attention to timing and execution; how and when to use the right arts, constantly building and using TP in a frantic dance of destruction, with only perfect precision granting you some of the juiciest damage numbers I’ve ever seen in a game. It takes a ploddingly slow combat loop into one that feels like you’re on a rollercoaster whenever you start. This on top of the expanded options to build your team, a job system that makes it endlessly satisfying to mix and match weaponry to find what will mesh, it’s far and away the best combat Xenoblade will ever see. Just a shame that Skell combat kinda sucks in comparison.

Xenoblade Chronicles X, more than any of the others in the series, is best described by being a single-player MMO. It introduces player creation, weird multiplayer kinda sorta interactions, an “open world” gated by the enemies that will splat you across the pavement if you’re too weak, and most exciting of all, tons upon tons of fetch quests!! While the story bits you get for these are really nice, the constant grinding loop of picking up shit hoping you’ll get the item you want this cycle, sometimes literally waiting for materials to be mined out for you, is what drags this game down so much. Everything I praised and enjoyed was at the expense of hours upon hours of time spent doing what felt like fuck-all, nearly always feeling like I was not enjoying my time doing this but doing it anyways for the sake of whatever story or gameplay reward I’d get. Truly emblematic of the MMO experience. Also, I truly cannot stress enough how much this game piles information and mechanics on you without ever giving you a break to digest any of it. Out of all the Monolith Soft long bad tutorials this game has the longest and the worst of them all.

This game is interesting. In the state Monolith Soft exists in now, we’ll probably never see something as ambitious or perhaps as daring as X again. Perhaps this was the catalyst that caused them to make utterly boring driveling shit from now on. It’s not by any means a fantastic game, and it’s definitely not for everyone, and even 8 years later it feels like the direction it took may still be too much for me to fully grasp as a Xenoblade 1-head; I still didn’t get nearly as much from this now as I still do from that game. But hey, it’s pretty good at the end of the day. Maybe we’ll get a Switch port once they find out how to effectively cut back on all the UI elements.

Also The key we’ve lost is Sawano’s best work.

shoutout to all the poor motherfuckers who got this on ps4 and couldnt get the symphonic suite mod

"Embarrassing" is the best word for this game. Somewhat in the sense that I felt embarrassed by it's various issues while playing, but moreso in the sense that the people working away at Pokemon Scarlet and Violet must have felt embarrassed putting it out in this state. The skeleton of a much better game is here, and the potential of really good innovation for Pokemon can be seen throughout. This game wanted to and could have been so much more, but Game Freak clearly didn't have the time or know-how to follow through with any of it. It's a real shame.

This review contains spoilers

With the mess that was the controversy leading up to its release, and the general downtrend of Platinum Games’ output, I wasn’t especially keen on getting Bayonetta 3 at all. I ended up grabbing it in the end, mostly just to just see how it would come out.

To my surprise, I enjoyed it a lot! Maybe it’s a case of lowering my expectations, but I had a much better time playing this than I thought I would. The gameplay as Bayonetta is easily the best in the series to me, with an incredibly fun new set of weaponry, impressively executed demon gameplay, and everything packing that signature Bayonetta punch. In a vacuum, everything Bayonetta 3 does in its gameplay is the best of its kind, and most of the praise I have for this game lies there. It’s incredible how well it’s all done.

The structure of the game however, is by far the worst. It follows a pretty rigid structure for the entire game: Go to an alternate world and location, meet that world’s respective Bayonetta, watch her get killed, then do a big demon battle. It only slightly deviates from this in its fun setpieces, but I found myself very worn out by this format very quickly.
The Homunculi, the new central enemy, are so much more boring compared to the angels and demons of games past, and even if they’re something new I almost feel like nothing would be better than them. The tone is something I wasn’t into either; it deviates from the gothic stylings of the previous two games into spreading a wide berth, and being a lot more bland overall for it… Doesn’t help that everything is bathed in a muddy, blurry wash on the Switch.

If you know Bayonetta, you already know most of these characters. Bayonetta, Jeanne, Rodin, Enzo, none of them are remarkably different in any sense, and that’s fine! They’re all great characters who continue to be great. The new major character they want to sell you on now, Viola, is a bit more of a mixed bag. Being a young witch-in-training, her loud attitude and penchant for screwing up plays well against Bayonetta’s cool elegance (and her pop-punk musical flavor rocks). On her own, she would sadly be totally unremarkable, which kind of makes me worry about how they want to make her the new focus going forward!

The ending is the biggest mark against this game by far. What an embarrassment. In a game that tries to take itself much more seriously than the rest of the series, every bit of writing is some of the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard, for which it never even bothers to explain itself or make sense, or be interesting, or good. When these writers step out of the campiness that is Bayonetta to tackle something more, it really starts to unravel the fact that they simply aren’t good writers in any sense.
Bayonetta being paired with Luka is gross too, and it totally undermines everything she was and is. Bayonetta was always unbound, relying on nobody but her own strength. Her unwavering strength comes from the facets of her femininity, which she never fears to put on display. Her representation as a female lead was always on a bit of a tightrope, but I felt it always kept steady for her. Until now. Now she gets to be tied down to a man, get to lose her individuality by being pushed into this hetero romance she has zero place in, and it sours everything I saw in her as a commanding and powerful woman. Now she’s just.. Another sex object for men. She fell off that tightrope hard.

Bayonetta 3 is still Bayonetta, in the end. It’s a game that I’d say is good, and that I enjoyed, but sadly can’t even get close to the peaks of quality Bayonetta 1 and 2 set. The story dragged this game down like a ball and chain, its structure felt horribly boring, how it passes the torch feels underbaked and horribly forced, and it just feels like a shame that the most refined gameplay Bayonetta has ever had has to be packaged in this.

I seriously can't believe this amateur hour idea of what a good soulslike game would be was published by Bandai Namco. This shit is so embarrassing!!

The character customization is fun and the charm of it's sheer unadulterated edginess is there for a while, but I quickly felt this game's wretched level design and utterly boring gameplay falling on me like an illness, or a knife in the back. Code Vein is like a case study on how to miss every single thing that makes a soulslike any good in the first place. A painful game to actually try and play.

From the menu to the order, it looks very cute, just like Miku! Once your pizza's delivered, have some fun with Miku!

It comes with a social camera function and you can take various poses - pictures of Miku. Very cool.

A visible improvement over the first game.. What would be a pretty generic fighter cashing in on the Street Fighter craze like the first game was is made its own by its creativity in characters and movesets. The characters in Power Instinct 2 are something that could only be done in this newborn fighting game heyday, when people haven't wholly commodified all the typical fighting game playstyles to fall on to. It's not at all balanced, the cpu opponents are brutally difficult for no reason (like they literally read your inputs and respond the exact frame, it's bullshit), and beyond the characters there's not much separating itself from it's numerous contemporaries, but it's a good time to play casually nonetheless.

one time i brought my friend carter over and instead of doing something fun i took pictures of him in photo dojo and then he left. i deleted his character like a month later to make room for my dog