A wonderful cast of characters which carry this game so hard. The interactions between Vivi and Steiner alone are enough for me to recommend this game to everyone.

It still is an old Final Fantasy game with all the annoying stuff that comes with that but it takes a big leap from FF VIII and has a lot of important quality-of-life improvements.

The story on its own has its interesting moments and takes an overused but pretty well-executed direction. What makes this game is the dialogue between the characters and their humour and emotions.
I just couldn't resist laughing every time Vivi just fell on his face for no reason at all.
It's nice to see how organic the whole squad ensembles which makes their interactions far more relatable.

I did not enjoy the art style of the human characters. The chibi style looks great on Vivi and Quina and even still works on a clunky character like Steiner but Lili, Zidane and Beatrixe just look awful with it. It looks like they are toddlers but then they gave Lili a skin-tight orange latex suit which makes her butt pop out weirdly. Very awkward and I did not like it at all.

Besides its questionable character style decision one of the best Final Fantasy titles.

I think I need a Vivi plush.

A perfect example in favour of style over substance.
At its core, this game is a buggy and repetitive mess, but consuming it as a form of art opens your eyes to all of its charm, humour and bravery. It just takes everything the developers thought was badass and mashes it together in this amazing mess.
There are 100 things that are bad about this game but the game in itself is not what this is about. The gameplay is a mere shell for the design and storytelling purposes like an unsalted nacho is a mere base for the guacamole. It has, what a lot of AAA games are missing nowadays.
Its character, hard edges, original ideas and jokes which go further than your everyday MCU puns.
Whoever played Drakengard 3 will feel a lot of similarities between those two games. Both are those weird pieces of media that just from looking at the gameplay shouldn't be rated nearly as high, but both are more than just that and keep players in love.
One of the most Iconic titles for the Wii and I still can't believe they were allowed to release this game on Nintendo's most family-friendly console to date.

feels like the stuff I'm doing in my dreams.

The death sound also really didn't have to be this realistic. Hearing Faith`s bones cracking and her body splattering everywhere every single time I fail a hard jump tilted me to insanity.

Combat is super boring and bad, the story feels like a cheap version of a teen's dystopian book and the lightning burns out your eyes if you play it in the evening.

Movement feels crispy clean most of the time and I was amazed at how intuitive it became after a few hours. Actually made me want to try out other parkour games. The music is solid and the overall look of it is pretty stylish even today.

The last 2 levels had no business to be that hard to beat. What had been a great time turned into a frustrated retrying of the same jump 20 times and not knowing where to go half of the time.

You have to play this game to see how great the momentum feels but don't drag yourself through all the levels this game hits its peak at level 5 to 6.

Hearing this ost will always make me smile.
This game has huge nostalgic value for me so before replaying it I was sure it's gonna be 5 stars for me.
Now that I've replayed it to 100% I've realized that I never finished this game as a kid and stopped somewhere around the bedroom dome although I've played it for an ungodly amount of time.
Either I was lazy or very bad at this game.
Interesting to see was, that the first levels I still actively remembered felt almost perfect to me.
I sincerely had so much fun with them, but as I progressed through the game and the levels became more and more unfamiliar I started to see all the flaws this game has.
The nostalgia wore off and I was able to experience this game unbiased.
One of the most frustrating parts was the camera combined with the unprecise controls especially the second after swapping gravity, but also the level design felt somewhat lazy towards the end.
Some worlds even felt like a fan-made game instead of AAA Mario designs.
What still surprises me is how good this game looks for an 2007 Wii title.
This game looks absolutely peak and overshadows even some newer Switch titles.
You also have to give them credit for their creativity and execution of a very complex idea for that time. Who would have thought putting Mario into space would make such an instant classic.
The normal ending after saving Peach goes pretty hard as well. Didnt expect a depiction of an everything-devouring black hole that leads to a new big bang creating a new universe in a Mario game.
Without nostalgia, this is a solid 4-star game but you gotta give it some credit for influencing my childhood that much so it gets 0,5 stars nostalgia bonus.

This game is a movie, and it's a fucking good one. Most astonishing action scene I've ever seen in a video game and the ending had me in tears.
Such a shame they ruined their storytelling masterpiece by forcing you to take fetch quests after every single major story progression.
You have the most dramatic sequence ever followed up by the worst and lamest quest you could imagine. And it's not like they try to give you a break from the intensity it's straight-up filler content to stop you from finishing this game in under 20 hours.
This could have been a contender for game of the year if they didn't fuck that up so hard.
It's like they had their A teamwork on half of the missions and some outsourced minimal-wage team work on the rest of it.
When it comes to those filling quests scripting is off, the dialogue feels awkward and the overall experience just plummets down to a shitty 3rd party action game.
A lot went wrong with this one and I'm not even sure if you can call it an RPG since items and equipment have almost no role in all of it. Not to speak of the side missions that are even more awful than the forced fetch quests in between.
I still love this game but damn they fucked this one up.
The best way to enjoy this is not to play it yourself but to enjoy it as an actual movie.

absolute gem on the DS. extremely unique at almost everything it does. great capture of Japanese youth in the mid-2000s. godlike ost and very pleasant pacing.

The combat was pretty good and the controls were surprisingly tight. I just never got to really make use of my teammate on the upper screen. 90% of the time I just spammed in one direction hoping for the best.
The lower half on the other hand worked like a charm and made me really appreciate this game's approach to the touchscreen on the DS.
Great variety of pins with a lot of different move-sets and effects.
Sadly a lot of this game's features never went to use in my playthrough because they either are way too complicated and useless to even bother or the age of time killed them. Another thing dragging it down is the semi-well-written story. The setting is amazing and exciting but over the course of those 21 days you get to know almost nothing about this interesting world. Even the postgame extra files don't explain a lot and rather infused the confusion I had. Maybe the second game answers all my questions.
I can definitely see its potential in its Era and still can't grasp how I missed this in my early teens.
Absolute must play for everyone who owns a DS and is into JRPGS.

Not quite my humor. Nonetheless, I had a good time with this game. I enjoyed the timing element of the fights and the interactions between Bowser Mario and Peach were charming. The character designs are a hit or miss. Some are creative and unique and some others are horrible generic and boring. The same goes for the humor. I had a few chuckles during my play through but most of the time I was more annoyed than entertained by its jokes. Mario doing improv still got me every single time.
Overall no matter if you enjoyed it or not you have to admit that it is a very solid, polished and well remade game that deserves nothing less than 4 stars.

mediocre.
As a kid, I loved this and had a lot of strong memories about it. Should have kept those memories and not replayed it. What was an almost perfect Star Wars game in my mind turned out to be a mediocre experience with an astonishing cringe story.
For its time it had a lot of good ideas and gimmicks like throwing Stormtroopers out of the window getting sucked out into space and closing those smashed windows with steel covers afterward.
The premise of the game still was very generic and boring. Go from place A to place B, maybe activate a few things and kill someone who is armed with a lightsaber. Those lightsaber duels are extremely boring and feel very clunky. I couldn't tell when and why I was able to damage my enemy and why not.
Overall it's an okayish game but replaying it severely damaged the reputation this piece of media had in my heart.

It is sad to see how much potential was wasted on this game. A few sections, especially when you are in buildings and start hallucinating, are breathtaking. Gorgeous visuals combined with a beautiful atmosphere left me open-mouthed more than once.
The potential was also wasted horrendously because you could only pet the dawgs and not properly the cats. wtf #notforcatslover
But sadly right after those sequences, you have a very generic semi-open-world shooter that indeed has some unique twists but ultimately consists of killing the same 4 enemies and clearing the same-looking areas repeatedly. It also felt rough around the edges many times and had many bugs and an overall unpolished feel. The story was alright but nothing to remember. For the 7 hours it takes to finish the main story, it was a fun experience but anything more than that becomes boring extremely fast.

I also just couldn't stop thinking about Sukuna whenever the protagonist talked to his hand...