This is a review for both Inazuma Eleven Big Bang and Supernova since I played them both.
Honestly what a great and fun game.
Controls were surprising responsive, the graphics for a 3DS game was fantastic and it's arguably one of the best looking 3DS games I've seen.
Palpacking wasn't too bad for me, and while it can be painfully grindly at times, at least your characters, especially will level up fast.

Story while not great, was still entertaining to experience.
The main thing that hold this hidden gem back from being a 5 star game was how frustratingly underpowered the Earth Eleven is, in terms of stats and movesets. Aside from the main 3, Terry/Ibuki and maybe Trina for TP reasons, there's very little reason to use the other Earth Eleven characters, especially almost all of them need Totems to function and Totems aren't that great in general.

Various Sliver and Purple coins scouts that you can recruit from Chapter 3 as well the 11 Earth Eleven additonal characters that you can recruit at the end Chapter 5 will make sure make that almost every Earth Eleven player will be glorified bench warmers, when you can recruit characters like Goldie, Bailong, Durual, Nathan, Beta, Fei, Tori, Gabi, Soul, Gamma, Simon, Wolfram etc.

Such a shame as I grew to like most of them, but their kits and stats are underwhelming and they completely fall off in the post game.

All and all, Inazuma Eleven Go Galaxy BB/SV is what I label as a hidden gem as well being one of the best 3DS games that we never got officially released.

A masterful return to glory for the Tekken franchise after how mediocre the previous 2 number entires were (barring Tag Team Tournament 2 which I adored, despite balance issues)

Tekken 8 just hits the rights notes for both story and gameplay.
Plus, phenomenal visual desgin and music.

One of my favourite games of 2024.

This is one of those strong cases where the characters singly handly carried the game.
The gameplay loop is too tedious and outdated for it's own good.
Having to play Where's Waldo for 40+ hours just to trigger characters events, recipes and story stuff isn't fun at all.
The mediocre and directionless storyline doesn't help much at all, as it's just the typical JRPG stuff that you seen before.
It's just unnecessarily padding for the sake of it.
The game really needed the event/quest markers.

Barring the characters, Alchemy system is excellent and arguably better than the Ryza Trilogy, due to being more complex and rewarding.

Fortunately, Sophie has a decently compelling cast of characters with Sophie, Julio, Corneria and Plachta being the standouts.

Oskar and Monika were okay, but they felt more typical best friend/childhood characters that you have seen before with not much depth to them

Overall, Atelier Sophie is a decent game, that is held back by jarringly outdated gameplay loop and meandering padded storyline.

The characters and alchemy system were the saving graces of Atelier Sophie that ulimately prevented the game from failing for me.